Guiding India towards a digital economy: Interview with S Anand, the Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of PaySprint

By Leandra Monteiro

S Anand, the Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of PaySprint in conversation with IBS Intelligence explain the transformational change India has undergone in terms of transactions and banking.

PaySprint is a FinTech venture focused on Next Gen Neo Banking Solutions, offering a Unified Open API Platform. PaySprint offers developers the ability to build a vast number of use cases leveraging its REST APIs and Entrepreneur, Startup companies, Banking partners, NBFCs, MSME & Enterprises to deploy these solutions.

What is the story behind launching PaySprint?

The Year 2020 saw India coming to age in terms of digital payments. One of the reasons this has been possible is through JAM – JanDhan Accounts, Aadhar & Mobile/smartphone penetration. Keeping the above 3 as core and the need for better, faster & easier technological solutions, led to the birth of PaySprint in 2022.

PaySprint is pioneering strong partnerships with the banking ecosystem and provides a Unified Open API Platform that will transform how India transacts and will lead to larger consumer adoption, interface and delight.

PaySprint offers developers the ability to build a vast number of use cases leveraging our REST API’s and Entrepreneur’s, Start-up companies, banking partners, NBFCs, MSME’s & Enterprises to deploy these solutions.

What sets PaySprint apart from any other neo-banking platforms?

Apart from being a neo–Banking Platform, PaySprint also has created – “A Unified Open API Platform” that:

• Reduces Time to Market
• Ensures Uniformity
• Improves Data Analytics
• High Scalability

It is an Open Platform that brings all the solutions seamlessly together:

• Faster and More Wholesome Integration
• Paperless Onboarding
• Choose Your Bank
• A Number of Value-Added Services
• Customer & Tech Support with a Dedicated Team
• Wide-Ranging Features on a Single Dashboard
• Plug and Play Model for Greater eValue
• Common Wallet for all Transactions, Checks and Balances

The bottom line is that PaySprint offers a single unified platform with myriad solutions for complete financial support.

What is API banking and how does it work?

API (Application Programming Interface) traditionally pertains to the tech interface between software programs. This interfacing ability facilitates a third-party application like PaySprint, to synchronise and connect to a bank’s tools and services.

API banking refers to a set of protocols that makes a bank’s services available to other third-party companies via APIs. This helps both banks and third-party companies augment their complementary specialities and offerings more than they can provide to their customers by themselves.

Over the last few years, APIs have become particularly significant to banks and FinTech companies. They provide better means to share data, integrate with systems, and personalise services, making financial services quick and efficient.

The same applies to banking. Banks grant secured access to their financial services to third-party platforms, helping companies build products around banking services. Essentially, the core of the banking operation remains the same, but the experience is heightened.

Let’s consider an example where the bank is ICICI, and the third-party company is PaySprint

• ICICI bank allows PaySprint to access its banking services, making transfers, balance query, and other functions available
• Next, the integration of ICICI’s APIs with PaySprint products takes place
• Finally, PaySprint makes API calls and fetches the necessary services from ICICI bank to further execute banking operations

What is prompting Indians, who love to deal in cash, to in fact give up cash, gradually and move to online payment modes?

Three things are helping Indians to move towards online from cash:

• Jan Dhan accounts or Bank Accounts – nearly 90% of eligible adults have a bank account
• Aadhar – more than a billion have Aadhar, which makes authentication of transaction easier and safe
• Smartphone penetration – India has 700 million smartphones and is expected to reach a billion smartphones in the next 2 years. This along with the lowest data cost in the world in creating a next Digital banking revolution

How has Digital banking impacted the Indian rural economy?

With 60% of Indians still in Rural India, it has a significant impact on the economic progress of the country, and with the emerging changes of ICT penetration, and the impact of demonetisation & Covid, alongside the digital initiatives carried out for rural segments, the need for improving the trends of digital payments model in rural India is very important. Considering the benefits like transparency in transactions, the scope for curtailing parallel economy and improving the ease of business, it is very essential that the transformation towards digital payments, even in the rural economy is empowered.

Some of the revolutionary developments in the recent past like the launch of many digital wallets like – Paytm, etc. UPI (united payment interface) apps like Google Pay, Phone Pay, and AePS, M-POS, Micro ATM, Aadhar Pay have led to the smooth transition of digital payments. Enabling digital payment transactions based on Aadhar numbers is proving to be a game-changer, especially for cash withdrawals in rural areas.

Indian economy is one of the fast-growing economies in the world. Despite global turbulences because of Covid. In the recent past, there are significant developments have taken place in the Indian financial system, which have led to huge transformations, trends and changes in the business dynamics.

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