Razorpay launches app store, insurance products, vernacular checkout page

Bengaluru-based fintech unicorn Razorpay has rolled out a slew of offerings, such as an app store, as well as features for ecommerce partners, UPI-based payments apps, and small and medium businesses.

The startup has also forayed into the insurance segment, co-founder and CTO Shashank Kumar said in the third edition of the company’s annual event FTX 2020.

Additionally, the payments gateway company will offer multilingual checkout pages, in Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Gujarati and Bengali, to cater to merchants and users in tier-III and tier-IV cities.

Razorpay Thirdwatch, an AI-driven solution to help online businesses deal with return to origin (RTO) and revenue loss, has helped ecommerce companies increase revenue by 25% and cut RTO by 50%, Kumar said. The Friday event saw the launch of an auto-correct address recommendation feature to further lower RTOs by correcting errors in addresses put in by customers.

The Razorpay Trusted Badge, the company said, will make customers more comfortable paying new merchants online. “Due to lack of trust, new merchants usually see 30% higher cart abandonments on the checkout page as compared to established merchants, and over 90% of overall orders are typically COD (cash on delivery), which, in turn, hurts the merchant's profits. The Razorpay Trusted Badge helps customers know that the business is credible and trustworthy,” the company said.

During the pandemic, the company launched low-code features such as payments link button, which was adopted by over 120 industries and 1,000 companies.

As subscription-based solutions have become a core revenue churning product over the past few months, the company will also offer a subscription button to customers. The solution is already used by Times Prime, UPI, Furlenco and PaisaBazaar, the startup said, and announced new partnerships with American Express and Aadhaar.

Additionally, Kumar announced the launch of the UPI Intent Links solution for SMBs, which will directly send payment links on a user’s preferred payments app. While Razorpay has supported UPI and NPCI’s backend features as a partner, Harshil Mathur, co-founder and CEO of the startup, told TechCircle that he has been in talks with companies to explore partnerships for the new umbrella entities (NUEs) to offer its solutions. According to media reports, the company may become a minority stakeholder in one of the NUEs.

“NUE is a great idea, especially in a country like where there are diverse businesses and needs and a huge mass to cater to. It will be difficult for a single entity to do that. NUE can be complementary to NPCI. We are actually talking to players looking to explore NUE, if there is a role we can play. If we find an opportunity where we can build differentiated products and innovate, we would like to participate,” he said. “I don’t think you can build anything better than UPI but there are other aspects where innovation is possible.”

Read: What makes Razorpay, India’s latest fintech unicorn, tick

After witnessing a plunge of nearly 30% in its overall payments volume in the initial months of the lockdown, Razorpay bounced back by “repurposing” its products and focus segments, Mathur said. Pre-pandemic, the payments gateway provider’s key revenue generators were the travel and lending segments, followed by ecommerce. Travel, having a higher average ticket size of Rs 2,000-3,000, made up nearly 25% of its revenue. Together with lending, it contributed 35-40% of the revenue.

However, the pandemic toppled the top revenue generators, making ecommerce the dominant segment, followed by edtech and “surprisingly” gaming, Mathur said.

“We were surprised to see Indians paying for online games, which, until now, wasn’t a strong segment when it came to paid versions. We started working with fantasy gaming platforms like Dream11, which had its unique payment needs. It was not just about the backend to accept user payments made but also to disburse it back to them,” Mathur said.

In a bid to diversify, Razorpay has partnered with Plum and ICICI Lombard to offer its first insurance product, which will enable client companies -- even those who just have two members -- to provide health insurance. The fintech company observed that less than 10% of Indian businesses could afford health insurance for their employees as the process is tedious, lacks transparency and is expensive. The problem is magnified for startups with less than 20 employees. Businesses using Razorpay Payroll can avail it within 60 minutes, at a starting cost of Rs 2 per day and cover pre-existing medical conditions and maternity.

Additionally, the company launched its first B2B app store, with a focus on the fintech industry, to enable the developer community to build solutions beyond fintech. It has already onboarded Shopify and WooCommerce to build an ecommerce site, online store and account managing platforms Quickbooks and Zoho Books, as well as crowdfunding and fundraising platform Crowdera on the app. At the event, Mathur announced a grant of Rs 1 crore for developers building innovative solutions and apps for its app store.

Mathur said, “There has been a lot of innovations in fintech but still in terms of India’s GDP, hardly 3% is coming through digital channels. What we have done so far is mostly on the payments side that too in B2C and consumer to merchant payments.”

“We have the best infrastructure in the country through UPI and cards but there is a lot left to be explored on the B2B side. For instance, merchant to employee payments, lending, vendor, and bank payments to name a few. Even in the launches we did (on Friday), we were trying to focus on B2B. The next two years of fintech growth will be defined by innovations on the B2B side,” he said.