This woman entrepreneur’s startup is reimagining how technology can empower transactional credit offered to customers

After long stints with banks and fintech companies, enjoying roles that gave her opportunities to disrupt and innovate, Aishwarya Jaishankar was keen on becoming an entrepreneur.

Her past experiences only solidified her resolve. As being part of India’s first digital savings account, she witnessed the power of digital and digital-led exponential growth. She also led a wholesale revamp of an MNC bank’s retail digital banking.

“Before becoming an entrepreneur, I started consulting for neobanks and fintech companies to help them work better with their bank partners. I was motivated to understand better how startups think and work. I realised there was big potential for banking as service offerings that go beyond just bank integration,” Aishwarya recalls.

However, the road to setting up Hyperface, a fintech product, was painful.

“It took months of knocking on multiple bank doors. Transactional credit in India is massively under-penetrated, with just 60 million credit cards versus 800 million debit cards. And, we chose credit cards and pay later as our first products,” she explains.

A full-stack model

Hyperface, launched in January this year, is the business of innovating transactional credit products in India. Its pay later product allows any lending technology company to issue a card to their customers with custom frequency, pricing, etc

It is also a customer experience and brand expression company, offering custom card and packaging design as a service.

Based in Bengaluru, Hyperface is addressing the retail and SME credit opportunity first.

“We understood early on that banks will want to stick with their core systems, so we offer a full stack as well as a wrapper model for a credit card as a service Integration. We are pre-integrated with a licensed PPI partner for the pay later product as well,” Aishwarya says.

“Across products, we are clear that we need to go beyond standard integrations, which simply transport core functionalities that anyone can offer. From real-time rewards to transaction enrichment, we are building premium APIs to ensure a significantly superior customer experience. Our products will not only allow fintechs to go to market with a card programme faster but also offer unique features, thereby helping them create a strong value proposition,” she adds.

Aishwarya’s Co-founder, Ramanathan RV, is a passionate techie with stints in Amazon and BankBazaar. He previously co-founded Juspay, a payment technology company, and came with a deep understanding of payments, technology, and infra.

Aishwarya’s experiences include a deep understanding of banking products, regulations, and building intense customer experiences. They met during her stint in the banking sector.

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Enabling credit to those in need

While Hyperface started in the Indian market, Aishwarya says the product for credit cards/pay later on prepaid is portable across markets. The company is keen to expand to Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and the US eventually.

Hyperface offers two products currently:

CCAAS: Credit card as a service stack, which helps fintechs, neobanks, and companies define everything from their onboarding processes to card controls — basically the entire customer life cycle.

BNPL on prepaid: The startup has partnered with leading prepaid payment instruments for the offering.

Its key clients include ecommerce companies, neobanks, and fintechs looking to offer credit cards to their customers. Its revenue model works via the pay-as-you-use pricing model.

Aishwarya believes Indian consumers face a huge gap as far as access to credit is concerned.

“A huge part of the population is underserved or not served by the credit card market. This is where Book Now, Pay Later (BNPL) comes in handy, especially for users with a poor credit score or no credit history.”

BNPL enables credit to millions of consumers such as low-income groups, self-employed individuals, or young workers, otherwise underserved by credit card companies, banks, or NBFCs.

According to an industry report, the BNPL industry alone is estimated to reach US$ 45-50 billion by 2026, with approximately 80-100 million users surpassing the unique credit card user base. BNPL annual disbursals are also expected to grow from approximately 3 percent of India’s total credit card spending in fiscal 2021 to approximately 15-20 percent by fiscal 2026.

India’s credit card market is an equally exciting story with a 25 percent CAGR, which is expected to expand significantly.

Globally, Hyperface aspires to be a Marqeta or a unit. In India, M2P and Zeta are their closest competitors.

Hyperface has raised $1.8 million in pre-seed funding from investors, including Cred's Kunal Shah, Sachin Bansal's 021, Better Capital, GFC, and Amara capital.

“We are seeing extremely significant interest from lending technologies keen to expand their credit offerings to pay later. Our unique approach of a pre-integrated service offering a faster GTM has been a key reason for this interest. On the credit card side, we have ecommerce and digital companies looking to expand their offerings and revenue through a co-branded credit card. The challenge now is to continue delivering value to these customers by helping them carve out exclusive and experience-led credit programmes,” she says.

“Hyperface’s mission is to reinvent, simplify, and improve access to credit cards by enabling fintech companies to partner with banks in a 10X more productive way that will enable them to power and execute unique credit card programmes,” Aishwarya signs off.