Will launch of Happay's India-first digital marketing expense card set a trend?

Business expense management startup Happay announced the launch of its 'Happay Digital Marketing Expense' card on Tuesday.

Designed to suit the monetary requirement of a digital marketing team, the card is designed to process, track, monitor and control the marketing spends, giving the organisation detailed financial summary of the expenses by the team.

Some of the other features of the card include – detailed financial summary of spends on a real-time basis ensuring transparency; setting limits and policies on marketing expenses; monitoring spends on multiple platforms along with single-screen data analysis on the spend pattern.

This card further enables organisations to fill the card with only a specific amount allocated for digital marketing, and link it to all the online tools and different ad networks.

Speaking at the launch, Anshul Rai, CEO and Co-founder, Happay said,

 As companies spend heavily on online marketing and advertising platform, absence of an appropriate data analysis tool makes it extremely difficult to monitor and control expenses on real-time basis. The Happay Digital Marketing Expense card is designed to monitor all the data and analytics on a single screen helping control spends systematically.

Varun Rathi, COO and Co-founder, Happay, said,

 Our new product is an endeavour to bring a change in the way expenses are managed and controlled by the companies. Today, we can proudly say that in a short span of time, we have successfully established a foothold in our client list, with more than 1,500 SMEs and enterprises ranging from hospitality, education, manufacturing and hyperlocal to consulting NGOs.

Founded in 2012, the Bengaluru-based startup is funded by early-stage venture firm Prime Venture Partners (PVP). The startup aims to make expense management cashless, paperless and mobile by simplifying the entire expense management workflow from recording of expenses to accounting. The firm has partnered with RBL Bank to enable its solutions and issue it to businesses.

Further, the startup’s solution disrupts the manual business expense management processes, which are costly and cumbersome with VISA cards. Over time, the business has established a foothold over 1500 SMEs and enterprises across 30 verticals in India.

So, why is this important? 

Primarily, because of two reasons. Considering the age of digital and Internet marketing, the expenses for businesses are heavily increasing. According to eMarketer estimates, advertisers in India are expected to spend about $7.41 billion on paid placements in all media, up 11.3 percent over 2015 spending levels.

Further, they estimate that this amount can rise up to $11.82 billion by 2020. while, a PwC report claims that the Indian markets will be hitting a billion in digital ad spending by next year.

The second trend is the rising practice of issuing digital cards by fintech companies. NiYO, another Prime Venture Partner portfolio company, is working with corporates to roll out flexi-benefit cards for helping individuals and employees to save more money from taxes. Just yesterday, the firm announced the launch of its multi-pocket card with YES Bank, which plans to add the product to its Smart Salary Product proposition.

So, how does it help both entities? While it helps banks to grow their masses, attracting more customers and on-boarding them to the proposition, it also helps fintech companies get direct access to a bank’s customer base, and getting the status of an issuer, which gives them have more autonomy in the market. All upcoming banks, of late, seem to be offering these propositions through partnerships.

Hence, this space of business expense management seems to be attracting some fintech companies to foray into the space while partnering with new-age banks.

Website: www.happay.in