Digital payment in India has witnessed a steep growth curve in the past few years where 48 billion digital transactions alone were recorded in the calendar year (CY) 2020 despite the COVID-19 pandemic and its effect on the economy, according to PwC. Indian banks and financial institutions are leaving no stone unturned to adopt advanced, flexible, and secure solutions to fulfill the expectations of an evolving customer. Realising a demand for this, recently fintech major Razorpay announced its acquisition for an undisclosed amount to I -Zealiant Technologies, a leading fintech startup that provides mobile-first, API-enabled, and cloud-ready payment processing products for banks and financial institutions.
Failed digital payments with Indian banks
The steep rise of digital payments in India can be owed to the increasing number of mobile device users. According to PwC, digital transactions in 2019-2020 amounted to Rs 3434 Crores and grew at an annual growth rate of 44.1 percent. The months of November and December 2020, alone witnessed more than 2.2 billion UPI transactions. However, with daily high volume digital transactions taking place, there are several incidents of failed digital payment due to technical issues arising from infrastructure, network outages, and server downtimes that affect customer confidence and satisfaction. In 2020, five of the top ten banks had a technical decline rate of 1.8 percent 2020. An RBI report necessitated the improvement of system design, monitoring, and architectural changes to address the issues of technical decline.
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According to PwC, digital transactions in 2019-2020 amounted to Rs 3434 Crores and grew at an annual growth rate of 44.1 percent.
How will Razorpay’s acquisition help?
This acquisition of Razorpay will help pursue state-of-the-art payment banking technologies that can not only meet evolving business needs but also tackle some of the financial industry’s most complex challenges. Izealiant will deploy its ‘ZealPro’ product suite in Indian banks through Razorpay. In addition to this, The ZealPro product suite has been deployed in over 50 banks across 18 countries, processing millions of transactions. It consists of five digital products such as :
Zeal TX3: Transaction acquiring, Authorization, and Switching to interchanges and core banking.
ZealCim: Consumer onboarding, Debit, and Prepaid card production and managing programs for consumer spending patterns and manage card insurance.
ZealWay: Offers payment aggregation with payment Gateway, QR Payments, MPOS, Mobile Payments, and Merchant Integration.
ZealMux: Defines, configures, onboard retail and online merchants to accept transactions and settle merchant payments seamlessly.
ZealMac2: Offers Multi-factor authentication with 3DS ACS, 3DS Server, and 3DS SDK that is certified for Verified by Visa, Master-card Secure code, and American express Safe key programs. & Mobile Token. It supports the authentication methods like OTP, Password, PIN, 3D secure, challenge-response, and a Mobile token that can be configured as per the customer’s requirements.
Razorpay’s acquisition will be a game-changer for the banking sector and its 8 million customer base that includes names such as Facebook, Ola, Zomato, Swiggy, and Cred. Combining payment abilities with IZealiant’s high-performing digital payment solutions, Razorpay can expand its business by developing advanced, flexible, and secure solutions payments experience for its banking customers. Before this acquisition, Razorpay had acquired Malaysia-based fintech firm Curlec, TERA Finlabs, (AI-based risk tech SaaS platform) in 2021, Opfin (payroll and HR management solution) in 2019, and Thirdwatch (fraud analytics AI-platform) in 2018.
