Fingpay App: Detailed Review with Features

29 April 2020 | 1449 Views | By

The effects of the current coronavirus crisis are being felt in nearly every sector. Starting from retail and consumer packaged goods to entertainment, sports, luxury goods, and of course travel and leisure, every sector is being impacted by COVID-19 lockdown in a special way and is facing down its own distinctive challenges. The financial services sector too is currently facing challenges on multiple fronts, for example, banks have reduced their operating hours and in many cases can only serve a few customers at a time due to social distancing rules, putting additional strain on channels like telephone service, online banking, and social media. Consumers are now increasingly ready to embrace digital wallets and contactless payments due to the fear of getting infected.

Contactless and digital payment methods certainly require less physical interaction and are more secure. Because of the lifestyle changes of the consumers, online retailers will experience a long-term boost if they can stay in business during what will likely be a rocky economy. To serve a population of nearly 1.3 billion requires a system having data of quite a large population. This problem can be addressed to using Aadhaar Enabled Payment System and Fingpay is tapping this much-needed technology.

About Fingpay

Founded in 2016 by Pratyush Halen and Anuraag Agrawal, Tapits Technologies is a Fintech Company that works towards financial inclusion and has developed innovative products and services under its brand Fingpay. This platform makes payments at the retail stores cashless, card-less and mobile less. Thus enhancing the customer experience by helping them shop bare pockets. This platform provides payment solutions to merchants and their customers using Unified Payments Interface (UPI), Aadhaar Pay, point of sales (PoS) and Bharat QR, along with account statement solutions and digital verifications.

The platform allows users to access essential banking and financial transactions, such as cash withdrawal and deposit, receive account statements, make digital, EMI and other bill payments. It also enables them to do customer’s bill payments like recharges, electricity, Insurance premium’s, etc. The product is apt for areas where payment needs to be done and also for agents who can roam around and collect the payments.

Fingpay claims to have on-boarded 10 crore people who can now access basic banking and online payment services. Last year, the startup claims to have recorded 200 million transactions worth over Rs 10,000 crore.

How does it operate?

The core attention of Fingpay is in payments using Biometrics. It upholds the Government Initiatives of “Digital India” by going digital. It has an android-based application and web portal for Merchants where they can connect a biometric reader to mobile or their computers and start accepting payments. Using the platform the payments are made digital using the bank accounts. The customer authenticates the transaction through biometrics and his bank account is then debited with the amount. This platform is helping corporates like MFI’s, Insurance and NBFC’s to digitize their complete on-field collections. Their product is now live with over 150 merchants.

Security

Passwords and pin codes are relatively slow and not as secure. There has been a constant increase in the cases of data breaches in the last 2 years, thus prompting payment providers and financial institutions to explore more secure modes of authentication. Biometric authentication helps address this problem. Acting as strong authentication to secure online transactions, biometrics also increases customer trust and improves reputation. It is a more secure system as it uses biometrics and only the account holder can pay using such a system as the biometrics are unique for every individual and in a world where hackers are becoming increasingly sophisticated, biometrics allows financial institutions to prove, who is requesting access. But though biometrics is more secure than passwords, and harder to replicate, a security breach in this is irreversible as one can change passwords, but can never change biometric data.

Benefits of using Fingpay

Apart from providing its customers the convenience of shopping bare pockets and allowing payment of various other bills digitally, Fingpay provides its customers an additional benefit of reduced collection costs in the range of 1-1.5% compared to the conventional collection model of lending institutions.

It even promotes Jan Dhan Yojana where people in financially inclusive areas are opening bank accounts and saving money in bank accounts and using them for payments and remittances. The rural people are not very comfortable using cards for making payments, thus here comes the real use of biometric-based payments.

Products offered by Fingpay

Fingpay works building solutions mainly in the area of payments and biometrics. They provide a wide range of products like Aadhaar Pay, UPI, Bharat QR, MPOS, eSign, eNACH, real-time verifications, onboarding solutions, etc. coupled with mobile, web applications, web portal for management. Detailed explanation to the same is as under:

Aadhaar Pay: Fingpay allows a merchant to accept payment from their customers using Aadhaar Pay. The customer just needs to have Aadhaar linked bank account to make the payment. A customer can pay using the fingerprint authentication.
Unified Payments Interface (UPI): This is also used by the merchants as a payment solution. UPI is a payment system that permits the user to transfer money between any two parties. Fingpay offers an instant real-time settlement system between two banks using the mobile platform. Read about BHIM UPI here.
Bharat QR: It is a QR based solution that enables digital payments and can be used across BharatQR enabled apps. It can be used for making Recurring payments of utility bills etc.
e-Sign: This is used by the customers to digitally sign forms and documents using Aadhaar number and OTP.
e-NACH: e-NACH is the short form for Electronic National Automated Clearing House. It is a new payment service that allows anyone with a bank account to easily automate recurring payments. Find out about NACH.
mPOS: mPOS stands for Mobile Point of sales. It allows the business to collect digital payments from credit/ debit cards using portable smartphone or tablets on the go.
BBPS: BBPS stands for Bharat Bill Payment System. It is an integrated bill payment system offering user-friendly bill payment service to customers. It offers the same through a network of agents of registered member as Agent Institutions, permitting multiple payment modes, and delivering instant confirmation of payment

Awards and accolades

Over the period of last 3 years, Fingpay has won the following accolades:

Winner of the HDFC Bank Innovation Summit 2016
Winner of Axis Bank payment hackathon 2016
Winner in Fintegrate Zone 2017
Next Big Idea contest (Zone Startups) 2017

Fingpay has got its incubation support from Zone Startups, Bombay stock exchange, Digital Media Zone, ICICI Innovation Center BIL Ryersons group, Fintech Valley Vizag, and Lodha group Accelerator. It has also got support from the Government of India and has even qualified under the Startup India program. Moreover, Fingpay had prior raised seed financing from ICICI Bank in 2018 and lately, it has even acquired a Series A funding of around 27 crore rupees from IvyCap Ventures.

What lies in the Future for Fingpay?

The increased reliance on mobile smart devices for financial transactions has prompted banks, payment providers and regulators to switch to newer and more secure technologies. There is a tremendous opportunity to help the under-banked population in rural India with solutions that are simple, easy to operate, accessible and tech-driven. And with the spreading of a pandemic like COVID-19, it has made people realize the importance of going digital. Fingpay plans to modernize the payment collections in India by solving the logistical inadequacies currently present in the system.

They strive towards thrilling their customers at every opportunity by providing exceptional customer service. Their product caters to the corporates and connects them with the last mile customer with the services which would help them uplift and provide useful services which will give them access to a wider market base, credit, better technology, banking, innovations, etc. This startup’s mission is to build strong and long-term relationships with their customers. The future looks optimistic for them, as they continue to develop a strong base of key customers and keep increasing the assets and investments of the company.