Udio: The social wallet that brings a community-driven aspect to digital transactions

Back in 2010, the digital revolution led to a massive rise in smartphone adoption as well as internet penetration in India. As a result, the country’s economy – which had hitherto been driven chiefly by cash – witnessed an exponential rise in the number of digital payments processed. However, despite the rapid growth, end-user transactions often suffered due to a lack of payments flexibility and a broken experience. This was in part due to a heavy dependence on promotional offers, discounts and deals as tools to aggregate customers by the extant industry players; such a capital-intensive approach often left payments service providers with little resources to invest into improving the robustness and the experience of their platforms. Anish Williams identified this gap in the Indian digital payments industry and established TranServ as a payments enabler that aimed to leverage technology to deliver highly efficient, flexible and seamless payments solutions to both consumers and businesses. “Our goal was to build unique payments experience that not just facilitated payments, but also delivered convenience and engagement to the consumer. This led to the conceptualisation and launch of Udio, India’s first social wallet, which brings in a community-driven aspect to digital transactions,” says Williams, CEO and co-founder, Udio. Explaining that TranServ is much more than just a digital wallet service provider, Williams says, “We offer a host of B2C, B2B and corporate payments-related services that add great value and convenience to user transactions. Our Product Suite for businesses, which provides API-based native wallet solutions to partner merchants, allows them to use the wallet as an engagement and promotional tool to engage and interact with their customers.” He adds that businesses such as BookMyShow, Askmebazaar.com, Portea and Crownit, as well as a host of smaller merchants and Facebook stores, have been using their B2B payments solutions. “We are working towards fulfilling our vision of making India a digitally-empowered, cashless economy, says Williams. The TranServ team currently comprises of 200 professionals. The business model for TranServ is based on generating revenues through processing payments for corporate partners, government institutions and retail customers. “While our banking partners have been leveraging the payments technology that has been designed in-house, our payments solutions have assisted several government initiatives in enabling hassle-free grants disbursal to the unbanked population of the country,” says Williams. He adds that the company has seen an exponential growth of 300% during the last fiscal period without compromising on the profitability of their venture. Talking about investing into technology, Williams says they will be looking to further improve their payments infrastructure, particularly the Udio Android/iOS apps for consumers as well as the API-based Product Suite for merchants. “We are also expecting our Digital Meal Voucher programme to demonstrate healthy growth and are looking to tap into other emerging sectors such as micro-lending to add greater diversity to our current payments offerings. We are additionally looking to improve our native payments integration with Micromax in order to drive the adoption of digital payments within the country’s consumer base,” adds Williams. “Technology has also been facilitating the user convenience on our platform,” says Williams talking about the Udio wallet, with its social payments capability that digitises day-to-day transactions and makes them instant, seamless and hassle-free. Sharing details about funding, Williams says they have recently secured a highly successful Series C investment. The $15 million funding was led by Micromax and IDFC SPICE Fund, and also saw participation from our existing investors Nirvana Venture Advisors and Faering Capital India. Williams asserts that their focus on creating and delivering unique transactional experiences for users sets TranServ apart from similar fintech players. “Unlike most of the other players, we do not depend on cashbacks, deals and discounts as the primary medium of consumer aggregation and retention. Our entire value proposition is developed by putting the consumer at the centre of our payments solutions,” explains Williams. With current partnerships with Micromax and Visa, the company aims to popularise digital payments in India by creating a well-integrated nexus of virtual and physical prepaid solutions. “We are looking to be the preferred payments partner for anyone and everyone who owns or aspires to own a digital device, be it a mobile-friendly college-going millennial or someone who is using a smartphone for the very first time. Having grown by 300% over the last year, we are targeting an annual growth rate of 300% to 500% for the current fiscal period,” says Williams. Williams strongly believes micro-lending will be a key area of opportunity that they will be looking to tap into in order to enable small-ticket, easily accessible loans for the country’s growing digital consumer base.