Zwitch to a new platform & start accepting payments by simply adding a few lines of codes to your site

The Indian payments industry is highly regulated, which basically means that it takes lot of paperwork and months of waiting to get approvals and set up/integrate a payments platform with a website. And by the time you set up the payment gateway, it would already have burned a hole in your pocket.

Two Bangalore-based entrepreneurs claim to have come up with a solution to address this pain point. They have developed a new platform called Zwitch that enables app developers and businesses to start accepting payments on their sites or mobile within a few hours of signing up, by just adding a few lines of code.

"All that merchants need to do is add the 'Zwitch.JS JavaScript' and a few lines of code to their site and they are good to go. They can start accepting payments within 24 hours of signing up, that too without being redirected to a payment gateway page," said Anish Achuthan, co-founder of Zwitch.

A property of iZwipe Payment Technologies Pvt Ltd, Zwitch was launched in December last year. The startup was founded by Achuthan, along with Mabel Chacko – both serial entrepreneurs who had previously co-founded mobile payment startups Cashnxt and Neartivity Wireless. Achuthan had also earlier worked at companies like PayU India and Onmobile.

How Zwitch is different?

According to Achuthan, the major USPs of Zwitch include a fully online on-boarding process that lets merchants start processing payments in less than 24 hours of signing up. Plus, its application programming interfaces (APIs) allow developers or merchants to design their own payment forms and keep customers on the site for check-out.

The co-founder said that the feature is powered by a technology called tokenisation where all sensitive data is encrypted from the client browser to the processing environment, reducing the scope of Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliance. The same feature is also available for in-app payments for both Android and iOS platforms in the form of native software development kits (SDKs) that allow developers to collect card payments directly on their mobile app.

The service is available as a Platform-as-a-Service (PAAS), and enables merchants to process over 100 payment options through its platform. The pricing starts at Rs 499 per month. The startup is initially targeting small businesses with its product. It has already bagged more than 300 customers, including Uberhealth, Testpress, Graaby, Medine, Syncbuddy, Inolyst Offergrid, Arrangedluv, Buspapa, Shipdesk, Skillay, Halwee and The Local Kadai, among others.

"We are betting on the fast growing Indian e-commerce industry wherein more and more small businesses are going online. We are also looking at launching the platform across other Asian and African markets," explained Achuthan.

Challenges

Achuthan says the biggest challenge the startup is facing is in terms of establishing relationships with third party processors and financial institutions. However, the founders past experience of setting up similar businesses came in handy in getting the initial processor relationship.

With a 10-member team, Zwitch is mainly competing with traditional payment gateways, and is planning to increase the headcount to 50 towards the end of this year. A bootstrapped company to date, the startup is also in talks to raise an institutional round of funding. "We are in talks with a few investors to raises funds which will be used for scaling up the technology platform, for sales & marketing and also for expanding to international markets," he said.

TC take

Although Zwitch seeks to disrupt the payments industry with its niche features, it is not the only company offering similar solutions. While there are the likes of WePay and Stripe in the US, Indian payment market is ruled by the likes of EBS, CCAvenue and VC-backed Citrus Pay. At a time when global companies are looking at India as a potential market, the entry of WePay or Strip could pose a huge threat to Zwitch.

(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)