Creating a payment gateway of choice

DigitSecure was incorporated in 2008, though the operations was started two years later, in 2010, when Jay Krishna, the founder, returned to India from the US where he was a SAP implementation architect. “It was initially conceptualised as a specialised company to help banks with fraud management of online transactions, the team saw a large opportunity in the budding ecommerce segment where over 90 per cent of transactions were CoD (Cash on Delivery) based. We were among the first to recognise this gap and bridge it, which resulted in the quick addition of marquee ecommerce clients between the 2011-2012 timeframe,” says Krishna, adding that DigitSecure was also the first to collect card payments at the doorstep for ecommerce clients as well as insurance clients using a single device.

The company identified the challenges that limited the reach of insurance, mutual funds, banking, and financial penetration to urban areas. Krishna explains that taking an overall view of the challenges, they created an end-to-end identity and payment platform that enables both customer onboarding and payment acceptance digitally, regardless of the device or the OS being used. “We are the only platform in India that offers an Aadhaar stack and EMV card payment options to create a seamlessly integrated one-stop solution to customers,” he points out.

Diverse capabilities

DigitSecure’s key offering is a ready to use platform that offers a variety of capabilities to their clients in order to enable them to on-board customers and collect payments digitally. The features include digital identification, digital contracts, digital payments (EMV, Aadhar, UPI, contactless), ready-to-use applications across operating systems, UIDAI, EMV certified devices with MDM, and so on. The products built on the platform offers IDPay, IDplus, and Lastmile.mobi with industry ready solutions for governmental, BFSI, and logistical verticals.

“Our solution seamlessly enables clients in target verticals to on-board customers, identify and accept digital payments in a way that is truly omnichannel while also being device and OS agnostic. This enables clients to rapidly expand offering digital distribution of products across various channels with limited IT, security effort either upfront or on an on-going basis,” states Krishna, reminding that currently IT, security, regulatory, and privacy concerns are the primary reasons why the digital distribution of various products and financial services could not be expanded to the last mile. The platform enables digital distribution while reducing cost, improving customer experience, and enhancing security.

According to Krishna innovation has been the answer to the gaps that address the need for digital distribution. “The need to have an end-to-end, ready-to-use platform which is secure, regulatorily compliant, cost effective, and enables digital distribution of financial services was truly the focus. We have undertaken an IoT approach to oversee that all the consumer interaction points (at a ration store, a retail shop, with an agent, an employee, or a courier person) are converted into digital distribution points that strictly adhere to global security standards and local regulatory guidelines,” he elaborates.

Going global

The platform has already been adopted by a few clients in other countries where it is being to suit the local regulatory framework. Sharing the future plans, Krishna shares, “Our vision is to introduce a truly secure ready-to-use SaaS platform that will work on our devices as well as our partners’. The overall philosophy remains the same as we explore new use cases that our platform is enabling in other countries, primarily based on biometrics, identity, mobile, and EMV card payments.” He discloses that the plan to expand to at least five more countries over the next twelve months.

Krishna believes that for the expansion of financial services and digital distribution of various products and services, the cost of customer onboarding and payment collection must be reduced. “This will enable true expansion of financial services to the last mile. For this to happen, services must go digital and offer great customer experience, security, and privacy to the end customers at all stages,” he remarks, adding that the perception of the customers about the security provided to their data is also a vital factor to the adoption of any technology, especially the type of data that is required from a customer to extent financial services.