India is one of the fastest-growing FinTech markets and has the third-largest ecosystem in the world. Today, the nation is witnessing several FinTech companies working to make things easier for the consumers with their innovations. One company that has gained traction in the Indian market is Simpl, a startup that works with merchants and financial institutions to make payments effortless and transparent. The company today process more than 2 million transactions on a monthly basis.

To know more about Simpl’s technology and how they are pulling their mission off in the Indian market, Analytics India Magazine got in touch with Russell Byrne, CFO and Head of Risk at Simpl and Chaitra Chidanand, Co-founder and COO at Simpl.

Making Payments Easy

Founded by Nityanand Sharma and Chaitra Chidanand, Simpl provides a credit mechanism or an ability for a user to pay at the point of sale. One of the core drivers of Simpl is UPI as it has the ability to move money in real-time without much friction or cost. Furthermore, it’s no cost and offers a lot of convenience and a layer of portability for your daily purchasing habits.

Simpl has created a software development kit with proprietary code. So, the company works closely with merchants and they provide some distinct information to Simpl that it uses to make real-time credit decision in terms of giving POS credit, which in turn allows them to transact with that merchant.

“We've actually created a network of merchants that accept Simpl as a form of payment. And using a bunch of different data and then integration with the merchant, we are providing users with a platform to pay those merchants at POS,” said Byrne.

When it comes to the security and fraudulent aspect, Simpl has a set of filters in place such as what payment a user is trying to do, where s/he is trying to do it, how the user is trying to do it. And based on these filters, the platform makes a decision. It also checks whether the user is a real economic actor and makes sure that s/he is eligible to make a purchase.

The Vital Role Of Data At Simpl

Coming to the tech stack aspect, Simpl is a cloud platform with AWS as the backbone and the company has a lot of proprietary technology that is built in-house.

Being from the FinTech space, the role of data at Simpl is really vital. With a team of 6-7 data science professionals, Simpl is making the best use of data. The company uses purely unstructured data and the major reason behind this according to Simpl is that credit bureaus and credit reporting agencies in India aren't nearly as advanced and developed as they are in the jurisdiction of the US. “The quality of the data and the coverage of the data is spotty. So you can't really clean a lot of information from that,” said Byrne.

As a result, the company’s entire underwriting stack is based on non-traditional data. And because of that, it is able to do a lot of things that other more folks in the payments and lending space aren't able to do.

Going deeper into the data space, the co-founder of Simpl Chaitra also explained the data process that Simpl follows. When it comes to data there is something called data co-operative — data that the merchants provide which is related to the merchant affinity. Another data is the ones that Simpl collects such as behavioural data, network data, carrier location etc.

When it comes to understanding how the company uses this data, Chaitra said, “If there is a data lake with lots of information. Though we don’t know who these people are, at a meta-level, we want to be able to figure out how do we narrow that data down — user that we could convert from non-transacting users to transacting ones.”

The Hiring Phase

Talking about the hiring phase at Simpl, Chaitra said that the knowledge of data science fundamentals is definitely important if a candidate wants to be a part of the team. But apart from that, a candidate must have the right attitude.

The Simpl COO has emphasised on the fact as to how important the right attitude is. “Attitude is really important — no matter how good your knowledge is or how skilled you are. At the end of the day, it’s all about fitting into the team and collaborate and deliver a top-notch product,” said Chaitra.

Furthermore, on the aptitude side, the company gives assignments to the candidate which they have to do there in the office itself. Chaitra said that the candidate could do the assignment at home but the main focus of the test is not just the result but also how the candidate takes an approach to solving the problem.

The Future Roadmap

Looking into the future, Simpl is planning to be the technology that surrounds the commerce. Now the company is serving the eCommerce domain, but it has plans for touching the offline domain as well. “Our goal in the coming years is that we want to be the de-facto of credit-focused payment networks. We want to be a player that is not just a payments platform but also want to be the network, the intelligence layer and we also want to be the credit reporting agency for the users to go and have a credit score,” said Byrne in conclusion.

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