[Startup of the day] Waging a war against cash, ScrewCash aims to be a super aggregator in the payments industry
It was 2014 and Sarabjot Singh had just completed his MBA to join a well cushioned job at American Express. Joining as a risk manager, Sarabjot’s job was to manage credit risk for the market and focus on growing profit for the company. This allowed him to work closely with small- and medium-sized businesses (SMB), eventually leading him to his eureka moment.
During the course of his work, Sarabjot failed to understand why the majority of merchants and kirana stores weren’t connected to the network. This disparity further nudged him to ideate upon building a useful technology platform to help Indian SMBs manage their finances.
The idea grew further when Sarabjot discussed it with his friend, Raksh Anand, a friend from his engineering days. Equally excited, the duo started work on ScrewCash in February 2015 and launched the platform that September.
Screwing cash over
It’s a no-brainer that ScrewCash aims at eliminating cash transactions while working as a payments-driven mobile application. Further, it also incentivises users, and helps SMBs run cashbacks and loyalty programmes. In this way, both business owners and customers form their target audience.
From a B2B perspective, the company helps businesses market their offerings by sending push notifications and creating profiles to make them more discoverable on the network. It also acts as an mPoS solution for these businesses, letting them collect payments via mobile phones and saving them from incurring any further hardware cost. Moreover, the B2B backend of the solution also allows these enterprise owners with reconciliation of payments.
Further, every merchant has a dedicated page on the app to give them better discoverability to the consumers. At present, the firm has already partnered with 200 SMBs (in Delhi) and is aiming to increase this number exponentially in the future.
Speaking of the B2C side, the app acts like an aggregator of payment options. While calling it payment- layer-agnostic, Sarabjot claims that the platform supports all payment methods, from debit/credit cards to net banking, while having integrated with wallets and payment gateways likewise.
The application also functions as a bill- and expense-management app, allowing users to easily split bills, send automatic reminders, and keep records of outstanding amounts while allowing P2P money transfer to others for payments. The target audience for the application is majorly college students in the age group of 19 to 22.
Their mobile application has seen more than 4,000 installs with the platform seeing an active customer rate of 85 percent and a retention rate of 30 percent at present.
Looking into the future
While speaking about the future, Sarabjot says that the firm is looking to integrate more organised players and payment gateways to their solution. At present integrated with Freecharge and Oxigen Wallet, the firm is looking to tie up with Paytm and other payment gateways. In the next year, ScrewCash is looking to undertake six to seven more such infrastructural partnerships.
Majorly functioning in Delhi, the startup is also looking to grow its base to other areas of Delhi NCR like Noida and Gurgaon while kick-starting their operations in Bengaluru and Mumbai. To increase their customer base, the firm is also looking to tie up with corporate houses.
The firm is also planning to integrate Unified Payments Interface (UPI) to its platform. By the end of this year, the aim is to have more than 1,000 SMBs as their partners, and over 5,000 transacting customers.
According to the company, the biggest differentiation against their competitors is in their multiple use case approach. Rather than focusing on and solving one unique use case, the platform takes care of multiple use cases with the underlying theme being payments.
This makes ScrewCash a super aggregator of payments. Further, the payments industry is the most loaded in the fintech space, attracting close to $866 million of the total $1.2 billion investments poured into this segment.
ScrewCash competes in three categories — with the likes of cash-back majors like Cashkaro and Crownit, bill-splitting apps like Splitwise, and money managers like Walnut and MoneyView.
But while integrating multiple use cases, ScrewCash will see success in the market only if it gets the right balance of merchants and customers while generating customer stickiness.