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HAPPAY: The Financial Guru

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Anushruti Singh
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With an estimate at around Rs. 2,400 crore annually, Happay announced its plans to acquire over 10,000 small, medium and large enterprises by 2019. Varun Rathi, COO and Co-Founder of Happay elaborates on how their platform is re-inventing companies’ expense workflow by deploying cashless cards and other expense modules.

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Varun Rathi, COO and Co-Founder, Happay

Major highlights in 2017

Happay is an end to end expense management solution linked to payments platform and it caters to SMBs and large enterprises. Last year, the product has evolved a lot and the main targets of the company were small and medium size companies that wants

to get digitized. When we started there were no such solutions in the market, we realise that there is gap in the SMB space because nobody was designing any solution for them. We moved a ladder a bit and realised the larger companies with 3K to 10K employees have been managing their expenses manually for the last 20–25 years. And also the process has not evolved at all, because nobody has thought about it becoming a problem and getting out of hand with the change in technology. Now these companies are coming up front and asking about automated solutions. This has been a major

milestone for us, we have able to target some of the largest enterprises in India and get them on board and that has been the major focus for us right now.

Solution Adoption Rate in SMBs space

The adoption rate has been great. Our customers are majorly from the SMBs space and the major adoption was recorded during the demonetization where our partners started to sell on our behalf. Financial institutions are one of the front end customers, where they need card based or financial solutions; they have become a major channel for us. There were no challenges earlier, but now the companies have realized that they need to record all the expenses they spend.

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Earlier, there were no methods to record, digitize expenses and claim the tax credits, but with our solution you can track with the plans on your mobile too that only begins in just Rs 300 per user.

Challenges in tapping SMBs and the initiatives to educate

It’s has been a long journey. We started selling around 3.5 years ago and till now we are only one player in the market; at least in the small and medium segment. It’s a huge success for us so far. We at

Happay try to reach out to more than 5K companies in a month and engage with them. We try to educate them about the concept and the platform for enhancing their productivity. In the 2 years course we have built an offline and online channel for tapping customers.

So far, SMBs are showing great interest and they are now aware too. People started searching for expense management solutions online, so there has been 25% increase in inbound queries over last one year.

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Customer base and Channel ecosystem

With the awareness we have created, we have got 4000 customers. In last one year we have successfully cracked the partner ecosystem in India. People have started noticing that Happay is one of the solutions which can leverage their productivity by keeping mind on expenses. Our some of the partner companies across geography are implementers of ERP solutions, Salesforce or HRM. We have also partnered with financial institutions like RBL and HDFC bank; both these banks are promoting the solutions to their corporate bid.

New Addition in Happay’s Portfolio 

We have expanded our portfolio with a simple card based solution to complete end-to-end travel and expense management solution. This also includes complete reimbursement module. Through these modules we are also able to capture those expenses also that have been done through any other card other than Happay card. We have integrated with some of the major credit card companies in India and that data flows back to Happay. For example, by using HDFC credit card we will be able to capture the expense, so you don’t need to get a new card or a Happay card from the company. You can still use the Happay app to submit your expenses.

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5 Modules to choose from

With the 5 modules we have companies can choose as per their requirements and commercials also depend upon what module they are choosing.

Companies like Oyo Rooms, Health & Glow, IBIBO Group, Uber, Urban Ladder, Chaayos and Aditya Birla Retail has chosen different modules. There is Petty Cash Module, travelling expense management module and there is a prepaid card for business expense. There are two other modules which we have launched last year. Micro finance companies, e-commerce and internet segment is also using our services. Then we have interesting used cases like famous production houses Dharma productions, Yashraj Films and Phantom Films that are using our

solutions.

Future of Cashless Economy

Future of the Indian market is going towards cashless transaction rapidly. From the business prospective, I think businesses are the most important player in making this happens because they are the main source of the money. If the source of transaction becomes cashless, it will create a natural effect. If a company pays 10K employees in a cashless way, this will further create a cashless infrastructure. For example, GST implementation is making people shift their mind set and managing everything through cashless.

Expansion plans and roadmap

We are going very aggressively after the enterprise segment and creating this channel ecosystem all across India. The company aims to capture a 50 percent market share by the year 2019. In terms of solutions we are adding more solutions to help the business manage almost all the expenses happening out of the bank account. With our new additions a company can manage operational expenses, salary payments, day to day expenditure and vendor payments too. For us

the next step will be to help the CFO manage all the expenses that are going out.

happay varun-rathi expense-management-solution cashless-cards
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