In an interview with TechGraph, Arun Poojari, Co-founder of Cashinvoice, said, “From an MSME perspective, there are multiple layers, where some are minutely impacted whereas the others are having to shut shops.”
Read complete interview:
TechGraph: What is Cashinvoice? How is it facilitating corporations to maintain their effective working capital cycle during the pandemic?
Arun Poojari: Cashinvoice is a digital Invoice marketplace designed to unlock trapped cash using the Supply Chain Finance approach. It is a one-stop destination for corporate buyers, their suppliers, and financiers to collaborate, and derive a win-win value proposition as it offers comprehensive payable and receivable management solutions that digitize the way businesses pay and get paid. It provides organized credit that is currently largely unorganized which directly helps the MSME eco-system that unfortunately bears the burden most often.
Our state-of-the-art technologies, together with our deep understanding of the domain, enable corporations to accelerate their transformation, modernize and mobilize their finance team’s operations, and maximize their business performance and help cut costs for companies and drive growth for vendors and dealers.
TechGraph: Could you walk us through the services offered by Cashinvoice?
Arun Poojari: Cashinvoice offers a customized platform solution to the Large anchor companies, their SME Buyers and Suppliers, and the Financiers to engage in a structured Supply Chain Finance program. Our key services include early payments to suppliers, Purchase order financing, Buyer financing, and Retailer Financing.
Apart from these core offerings, our technology enables the participant to gain a deeper understanding of their Supply Chain as a whole and resultantly gain control over their cash flows.
TechGraph: What is the state of Supply chain finance in India?
Arun Poojari: Supply Chain Financing has played a key role in helping corporates function effectively and boost the economy amidst multiple COVID waves. The broader objective is that the rightful money that one owes from another business should be received without follow-ups, let alone delays and consistent back and forth.
This was the main reason why we launched Cashinvoice in the first place. This became even more essential through the pandemic.
During the 1st lockdown, we launched the mobile and digital web application that helped with business continuity during a challenging phase. We ensured that we were well prepared by the 2nd lockdown as more than 3,500 suppliers looked up to us to address their liquidity woes at that point.
The government has done a commendable job in terms of pushing liquidity in the market with an effective rollout system. The ease of liquidity has especially helped B2B organizations to kickstart operations.
But, from an MSME perspective, there are multiple layers, where some are minutely impacted whereas the others are having to shut shops. In this ecosystem, sometimes it so happens that the last man standing needs the most support. Banks, although capable of small-ticket financing, do not usually prefer to do so directly which creates a bottleneck in the supply chain. Thus, a well-lubricated Supply Chain Financing system is the need of the hour.
TechGraph: How do you see technologies namely Artificial Intelligence, Data Center, and Cloud, with regards to their relevance across the financial sector? What does the future look like?
Arun Poojari: The Pandemic accelerated digital adoption by different industries and companies. Fintech companies are enabling financial inclusion now more than ever. Technology like Artificial Intelligence and Cloud is at the core of this revolutionary moment as it helps in key operational areas like improving business communication, optimizing production, inventory management, security, and financial record-keeping.
At Cashinvoice we use the latest technologies to build our platforms. For our applications, we use the latest tech stack which is entirely hosted on Cloud. Our mobile app is built on Native OS such as Android and iOS. We also use sophisticated BI tools for data analysis.
We use different channels to gather the required information of the client after getting their consent and then analyze that information and data that come through in real-time. The main role of technology in our business is access to information, data assessment, decision making, and service.
The risk rule engine is run on the gathered information to calculate the score which determines the eligibility of a user to get a credit. Eligible users are then Digitally onboarded and all the required documents e-signed. We have created multiple technological utilities which enable us to integrate our platform with the largest of the ERP systems to the smallest of accounting systems at the client end.
Special emphasis was given to building Analytical tools which provide a detailed analysis to our clients of their Accounts Receivable. The data analytics provided by Cashinvoice helps corporate customers with key insights to improve the efficiency of their Supply Chain Finance programs.
TechGraph: Technological challenges while building Cashinvoice during Pandemic?
Arun Poojari: Digital product development, especially the ones such as Cashinvoice which have little precedence, requires a lot of teamwork and collaboration between the domain experts and developers. During the initial phases of the pandemic, this became a bit of a challenge. But we were able to overcome this quickly by establishing a virtual workplace that encouraged a collaborative atmosphere.
Digital adoption, although accelerated because of the pandemic, lacked foundational presence at many of our clients.
We had to reinforce our capabilities and widen the horizon to build an end to end implementation solutions. This has further helped us gain a perspective on client requirements and helped us make products better suited for the Supply Chains, small or big alike.
TechGraph: Which are the key sectors driving the growth of Cashinvoice?
Arun Poojari: Cashinvoice has established a wide presence in the Automobile sector where cash flows are essential to keep the industry running. Apart from that over the last couple of years, we have spread to many other key sectors such as Engineering, FMCG, Consumer Durables, Electronics, Retail, etc.
Going forward, we intend to implement our solutions across all industries with reasonable large Supply Chains.
TechGraph: What are the new products in the pipeline?
Arun Poojari: Having observed that unfortunately, it’s MSMEs that mostly face the burden of trapped cash in a supply chain, we have launched many MSME-oriented products recently. We are focusing on small-scale companies with less than 1cr turnover, micro-companies that have no or low access to formal credit (Micro-size loans – 50k – 50 lacs).
We strongly believe our analytics-driven digital solutions can help deliver the much anticipated financial inclusion to many of these companies who remain out of reach for the majority of institutional lenders.
We intend to grow our product portfolio further downstream to enable funding avenues for the last mile of the Supply Chain.