The payments bet: finding the transaction that was still broken

Payments is an interesting category in India because, at one level, you could argue that the problem is largely solved. UPI has made moving money incredibly easy. Consumers are comfortable paying digitally. Merchants across the country accept digital payments. India has built one of the best payments infrastructures anywhere in the world. So the question for us was never really, what is the next generic payments company? It was more often, where is the transaction still broken? Because once you start looking at payments inside specific industries and specific use cases, you realize that there are still a lot of places where moving money is cumbersome, expensive, opaque or simply not designed around the experience the user actually needs. That became an interesting area for us at Better Capital. Skydo is probably one of the clearest examples. If you are an Indian company or freelancer getting paid by customers outside India, the experience historically has been surprisingly cumbersome. There are bank wires, foreign exchange markups, compliance requirements, documentation and often very little transparency around what you are actually paying. The problem was not that there was no way to receive money internationally. Of course there was. The problem was that the experience was nowhere close to what you would expect from a modern financial product. Skydo essentially started there. Make getting paid by a global customer feel almost as simple as getting paid locally. Give the business transparency on foreign exchange, make the compliance and documentation easier, and take away a lot of the friction that had simply been accepted as part of cross border payments. Today, Skydo is authorised under the RBI’s cross border payment aggregator framework and is used by tens of thousands of Indian businesses and freelancers. What I like about the Skydo example is that it was not payments for the sake of payments. There was a very specific customer with a very specific transaction that was broken, and payments happened to sit right at the center of solving it. Vendekin came from a completely different direction. When Aroon started Vendekin, vending machines were still largely built around an older world of cash and fairly dumb hardware. But if unattended retail was going to become much larger, the entire transaction needed to become digital. Vendekin initially built a mobile payment system for vending machines and then kept building around the problem. Once you digitize the payment, you can digitize the machine, the inventory, the operations and eventually the entire unattended retail experience. That is essentially what the company has evolved into today. Again, payments was not really the end product. It was the unlock. Driffle is another example that I find quite interesting because you would not necessarily look at it and say this is a payments company. Driffle is a marketplace for gaming and digital goods. But when you try to build a global marketplace like

Original source: Entrackr