PayU has put in place a robust business continuity plan to ensure that work goes on as per the course and our merchants, employees, and vendors do not get impacted. In light of the demand after COVID 19, we have focussed on omnichannel solutions and solutions such as PayU ePOS, Bharat QR, and EFT for contactless retail sales. EMI and credit at POS are offered by PayU in partnership with merchants to stimulate consumption and offer credit to customers at the point of sale on all platforms, says Gurjodhpal Singh, Senior Vice President, Growth Initiatives – PayU India, in conversation with Rashi Aditi Ghosh of Elets News Network (ENN).
- The outbreak of Covid-19 has made the use of Digital Payments a little more significant than earlier. How is PayU handling the change in demand?
COVID-19 has given a huge impetus to digital transactions. While there was an increase in the adoption of digital payments even before the pandemic, social distancing and fear of contaminated currency have greatly accelerated this behaviour shift. Several merchants – both large organizations and small scale retail stores – have reached out to us for contactless solutions. Case in point, in May the omnichannel team at PayU received more than 10x the number of leads as usual.
In our SMB vertical, PayU witnessed a 3x increase in merchant acquisition and 2x YoY growth as of the fiscal year ending in March 2020. Smaller, retail merchants such as grocery stores, schools, hospitals, and residential societies, have been reaching out to us as well for digital solutions. While the digital payments sector has been adversely affected by COVID 19, it has also brought opportunities.
PayU offers customized solutions to cater to the requirements of all segments of businesses. In light of the demand after COVID 19, we have focussed on omnichannel solutions and solutions such as PayU ePOS, Bharat QR, and EFT for contactless retail sales. EMI and credit at POS are offered by PayU in partnership with merchants to stimulate consumption and offer credit to customers at the point of sale on all platforms.
- PayU introduced industry-first technology to improve merchant care. Tell us about this development and its importance.
PayU’s best in class products and technological expertise drive its leadership position. The merchant experience team at PayU manages a portfolio of more than 3.5 lakh merchants and services them through multiple channels. At PayU, the first principle of servicing is to resolve issues as quickly as possible and the second principle is to ensure the best quality, which we achieve by using cutting edge technology.
For example, recently with the help of PayU’s automated dashboard, we achieved a new milestone in our chargeback settlement process. A chargeback is one of the most time consuming and tedious processes that a merchant has to face; if it is not handled well it results in loss of revenues and brand equity.
With its automated chargeback process, PayU India has been able to make the system more seamless and robust for merchants, succeeding in keeping its chargeback ratio at a best-in-industry rate of 0.05%. With the help of AI & ML, the PayU dashboard automatically classifies chargeback cases into multiple categories. Post classification, the dashboard has a built-in mechanism to deal with issues on the merchant’s behalf. All these developments have helped merchants to represent their chargeback cases to banks in almost zero time. This has helped to make chargeback a seamless experience that otherwise is confusing, complicated, and time-consuming.PayU has the distinction of introducing several industry-first, innovative features to create a seamless, hassle-free experience for merchants, especially in the SMB sector:
Also Read: PayU India unveils EFT Payment Option to assist Merchants
o Automated onboarding and risk assessment is a key advantage that PayU offers. The risk assessment and onboarding processes are 100% online, which is a boon for smaller businesses since we offer easy integration of payment gateway on all platforms. Merchants can be onboarded in as little as one day, where the industry average is 10-15 days.
o PayU Assist was introduced last year and is an AI-driven automated customer service platform, which unifies the capabilities of FAQs, chatbots, and query management in a single service engine.PayU strives to take on as many back-end functions as possible so that merchants can focus on growing core businesses.
- How are you minimizing the merchant queries? Do you have any automated functions in place?
AI and ML usage are deeply embedded in PayU’s merchant care function. PayU Assist is an AI-based merchant service platform that provides automated customer service experience to merchants. Email-based, manual communication has generally been the norm in customer service for payment gateways. This leads to delays in query resolution and eventually, merchant dissatisfaction as they require swift and efficient assistance.
With Assist, PayU has unified the capabilities of FAQs, chatbots, and query management in a single service engine. Powered by advanced technology, based on machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms, PayU Assist has transformed the entire merchant experience.Since its launch last year, PayU Assist has achieved a 70% reduction in weekly merchant queries and a 95% reduction in retail buyer queries. Merchant queries fell from an average of 2300 a week to 650 a week. The average resolution time for queries also dropped from 25 hours in September 2019 to as low as 2 hours in December 2019, ensuring that businesses face as little delay as possible.
Approximately 3500 merchants visit PayU Assist weekly, of whom 74% have given the app a ‘100% satisfaction’ score. PayU aims to increase this percentage of satisfied merchants from 74% to 90%. Further, the PayU app is also integrated with PayU Assist, so merchants can access instant hassle-free query resolution and support on the move, on their phones.
- What, in particular, is the firm doing to ensure contactless operations during the pandemic?
PayU has put in place a robust business continuity plan to ensure that work goes on as per the course and our merchants, employees, and vendors do not get impacted. PayU has solutions to cater to digital payment requirements for all segments of businesses, encouraging merchants to go online, and enabling business continuity.
- PayU ePOS allows merchants to accept contactless payments through their smartphone via multiple modes –uniquely generated QR or payment links which can be shared over email, SMS, or WhatsApp. This is especially beneficial in providing payment solutions to servicing teams of large service network companies.
- Bharat QR enables us to reach out to the smallest individual mom-and-pop stores as well as larger retail stores. It is convenient as it requires the very little installation of machines or infrastructure and therefore is popular among merchants.
- EFT offers offline to online solutions for high-value transactions. A customer can use the NEFT/RTGS option listed on the merchant’s checkout page to generate a one-time use challan to initiate the transaction. The customer can subsequently visit their bank’s branch to complete the payment. It helps merchants access those customers and businesses who prefer making payments via bank branches for high-value transactions, especially in Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities and towns.
- PayU also enables merchants to accept international payments or cross border payments, thus facilitating them to cater to a global customer base. Merchants can accept payments in 100+ currencies at the best possible rates in the market. With algorithm-based risk assessment tools and the highest level of authentication, PayU ensures best in industry success rates for cross border transactions.
PayU also has solutions specifically for SMBs to encourage them to go online and increase their digital reach:
- The Bringing India Online initiative helps businesses accept digital payments and connect with a stay at home customers. PayU offered to build free websites for any merchant with a built-in payment gateway & get 100 percent TDR waiver on the first Rs 50,000 worth of business done via PayU.
- Startups Helping Startups platform was created for emerging businesses to help each other. With as many as 32 partners such as Shopify, ZOHO, Shopmatic, Verloop, Atlassian, etc., start-ups can avail offers ranging from setting up e-commerce stores at Rs 50 per month to the free web, app and Whatsapp Chatbots for customer support automation.
- What are your measures to ensure risk management?
The acquisition of Wibmo enables PayU to build a robust digital payment ecosystem capable of harmonizing transaction processing on both issuing and acquiring sides, to deliver a seamless payment experience and industry-leading success rates in online and mobile payments. Together, PayU and Wibmo have an industry-leading run rate of 3 billion transactions.
The integration of Wibmo has helped us offer innovative One-Step TM frictionless device-fingerprinting, authentication through downloadable apps, and behaviormodeling for fraud detection to our customers. Wibmo’s innovative digital payment security solutions help authenticate genuine transactions while keeping fraudulent ones at bay. With Wibmo, PayU provides an end-to-end solution through the entire transaction process.
PayU also has its proprietary risk engine, developed globally for the PayU platform, and also now uses best in class third party risk engines. PayU’s payments engine is built for global internet businesses facing evolving fraud threats.
We have in-house risk management tool which is capable of processing advanced rules based on multiple parameters like thresholds, attempts, fraud blacklists, cards, emails, phone, etc. to prevent frauds. The rules can be customized to fit different requirements such as industry, merchant requests, fraud trends, etc. The system is capable of accommodating multi-parameter, velocity & pattern rules for effective fraud management.
PayU is PCI-DSS certified to handle sensitive payments data with best in class encryption algorithms. It also has benchmarked risk assessment processes to prevent frauds amongst merchants. PayU has deployed SHA512 and 2048 SSL Key encryption algorithms and benchmarked risk assessment processes to prevent frauds amongst merchants.
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