Vishwas Patel, Founder and CEO, Avenues India, Mumbai

"In 1994, I worked with my younger brother to start Seasons, now India's biggest ethnic garments store. Thereafter, I took a sabbatical to study Law as I knew that having a trained legal mind was necessary to become a successful entrepreneur. I practiced for 2 years in

Mumbai High Court. However, I rejoined business in 2001 and took up the challenge of retailing our ethnic garments online to our global NRI customers. But I soon realised that the banks' existing payment gateways did not meet the needs of an Indian businessman," says Vishwas.

"I wanted a low cost, simple to use, and quick to market payment gateway solution. But what I got in bargain was an expensive, complicated solution for which I had already spent lot of time and effort to acquire it. And then I had to hire expensive IT professionals to run it. So I decided why not build my own e-commerce solution that meets the need of businessmen like me. I took the whole concept one step further and decided to create a series of 'Avenues' that makes it easy for various businesses to do business online. That's how I founded my company called Avenues in 2001 and launched CCAvenue, India's first third party payment gateway solution for India's web merchants".

There was no netbanking solution those days. Merchants were skeptical of using credit cards online for cash transaction. Credit card penetration was low and awareness about e-commerce was not there. Banks scoffed at the idea of third party aggregators providing payment gateway services but Vishwas was able to convince HDFC Bank of his company's credentials and launched CCAvenue payment gateway solution on 1st September, 2001. However, HDFC Bank closed their online payment gateway business on 10th September 2001 because of the disputes with their technology providers based out of Singapore. To add salt to their injuries, 9/11 terror attacks severely affected the global markets including India.

"We had 35-35 merchants and no gateway to process. We took 100% liability for payment to banks and acted as a guarantor on behalf of the merchants. Soon we tied-up with ICICI and Citibank and, a team of 15-20 people worked hard for next two months to get business on track," says Vishwas. "We were in a business where everybody speculated about the growth potential but there was no existing business model for e-commerce available in the market."

He and his team worked hard on various fronts such as risk management for security and safety of e-transactions, developing software and back-end support for storage of data and cross-checking of each transaction, inventing clauses for all possible kinds of complications in e-commerce business and structuring a legal framework to deal with them etc. Above all, they worked on developing awareness and trust among business community to encourage them to do business online.

And the businessmen repaid the trust in kind. In the year 2002, 500 merchants took to CC Avenue for their online business. Every transaction henceforth cemented Avenues credibility in the market. By 2003, they became the biggest direct debit engine with 14 banks availing CCAvenue platform and today more than 90% of India's web merchants use the CCAvenue payment gateway solution to process their online payments.

Despite offering a robust payment gateway, there were many verticals that were not doing business online. Vishwas Patel started probing into the reasons. "I found out that 55% of global e-commerce was travel related, which was not surprising since selling air tickets and hotel rooms on the internet was very easy, vis-à-vis other products where there is an element of touch and feel aspect to it. I also got to know that most of the existing online travel websites at that time were charging exorbitant commission- upto 30%- from hotels for each online booking," says Vishwas.

The hoteliers were not too happy being at the mercy of the OTA's and wholesalers. At the same time they all knew that in order to increase their average room rates, they have to utilise the internet platform to reach out directly to their patrons and corporates and offer the perishable room inventory. However they did not have the technology competence to build and manage the systems in house.

In 2004, Vishwas launched ResAvenue, a fully hosted, plug-and-play booking engine that integrates directly into the hotel's branded website, thereby enabling the hoteliers to save big money on recurring high-end hardware costs, software licenses, and expensive technical manpower. It is a cutting edge reservation engine which allows the hotelier to accept reservations in 15 international languages and accept real time payments in multiple currencies. "We also tied-up with Pegasus, an American company to get linked to all the four Global Distribution Systems providing real-time information on hotels and flight bookings across the world," says Vishwas.

Now, more than 1000 hotel properties in India, Bali, Singapore, Malaysia, Egypt and UAE use ResAvenue reservation and distribution system on their branded hotel website to reach out directly to their customers/corporates as well as distribute their room inventory to millions of agents world wide. "We are today, the single-largest customised hotel reservation engine in South-East Asia," adds Vishwas.

Constant search for better avenues for merchants to do business online led him to one of the biggest travel conference in 2006 called Eye for Travel at Mumbai. However, he faced a tough time in getting the online registration for the event. "Event organisers are more worried about the arrangement, booking of the hall, decoration and putting up of stalls; selling the stall space and member registration comes much later- at times the confirmation of the participant reaches after the event is over," says Vishwas. 

Vishwas came up with EventAvenue in 2007, a comprehensive web application to create, publish, and advertise events and offer real time online registration and booking with real time payments right from the organisers own website. It also has an interactive stall map booking facility, which allows the event organiser to publish his stalls plan online and allows his prospective exhibitors to book the exhibition stall/space in real time. "Bar codes have been introduced for the tickets and any delegate can register for the conference online and just walk into the event" says Vishwas. In 2008 alone, EventAvenue has powered more than 500 conferences and exhibitions. Its ticketing systems was launched during the last IPL season and Deccan Chargers (Hyderabad), one of the IPL teams, was the first to use Event Avenue's ticketing system, which sold more than 90,000 tickets online.

Vishwas followed EventAvenue with HotelsAvenue in 2008. "HotelsAvenue is a customisable booking engine for the travel agents. Travel agents across India can use HotelsAvenue to build their brand online and offer more than 1, 00,000 hotels real time room inventory to their customers. Agents earn 7% commission for each booking processed through the HotelsAvenue system and they do not have to pay a single rupee for setting up their own branded portal online or any kind of recurring charges for the systems maintenance. A lot of brick and mortar travel agents are in peril because of the airline companies moving to a zero commission structure. And they are not able to compete with big VC funded online travel portals like MakeMyTrip, Yatra, Clear Trip, TravelGuru etc. These brick n mortar agents can't afford to sink crores of rupees into technology nor do they have the reach and financial strength to have contracts with Indian and International Hotels for good rates and get confirmed room inventory. "HotelsAvenue provides these agents with the technology and confirmed room inventory of global hotels at best rates, thus giving them a level playing field to compete with the best in business without investing a single rupee" says Vishwas. 

The Avenues India snowball will continue to roll next year as Vishwas will launch TrustAvenue by March 2009 and MembersAvenue by the end of next year. "With Trust Avenue, we will be offering our robust risk management expertise to other companies engaged in e-commerce," says Vishwas. "Through its comprehensive fraud screening system, merchants can accurately detect and automatically flag attempted fraud from card transactions. All we ask for is five basic parameters of each e-transaction and we will deliver with 141 parameters including a fraud score that authenticates the validity of the user."

With MembersAvenue, Vishwas has ambitious plans to provide a hosted membership management solution to clubs, gymkhanas, associations, housing societies, cable companies, non-profits, and other organisations with the most comprehensive web based membership management technology available anywhere. It will help increase member involvement, recruitment, and retention.

"Business is like an inverted triangle. You start from a small dot at the bottom and as you grow your business upwards, the opportunities keep on increasing. Avenues is a debt-free and investment-free company as it today generates enough revenues from its various 'Avenues' to take care of its financial needs. We have always grown through internal accruals; we have always been cash-flow positive and highly profitable company. All our growth is funded out of internal reserves and hence we don't have to borrow or sell equity to outside investors", says Vishwas. Avenues India, which was started with a seed capital of Rs8 lakh in 2001, did a business of Rs 246crore in the last financial year and is slated to do a turnover of Rs320 crores by March 2009.