Fintech major Razorpay has charted out an ambitious growth story with a target of $90 billion in payments volume in 2022 and three new products. In an interview with BusinessLine , Harshil Mathur, CEO and co-founder, Razorpay spoke about the rising adoption of digital payments by small businesses and said the company is not looking to work in the cryptocurrency space until there is a clear law in place. Excerpts:
How is the company doing? You have announced a lot of new products?
We are doing $60 billion of payment volumes on our platform annually and we are on track to target $90 billion next year. So that's a significant jump in just two years alone and it is happening on the back of growth in the internet ecosystem and us playing a significant role in the internet-first companies. Today, we have more than 8 million businesses on our platform. To give an idea, about 40-42 companies turned unicorn this year and we power 33 of them. Our goal has been to build a full-stack financial ecosystem for businesses. The idea is that if a business starts today, how can we enable their journey end to end. We have launched three products — Razorpay Magic Checkout, Razorpay Tax Payment Suite and Razorpay Rize.
Razorpay had launched TokenHQ, a card tokenisation solution? With the deadline from January 1, how well prepared are businesses?
We have been in the frontrunners in the tokenisation and recurring payment space. We power about eight to 10 banks already for recurring payments and we expect 10 to 15 more banks to go live in the next couple of weeks on our recurring payment solution. We were the first ones to enable a multi-network tokenisation solution with RuPay, Visa and MasterCard. We have seen a really rapid scale up on that. We have over 1,000 merchants live on that, and a lot more slated to be live in a couple of weeks as this deadline gets closer. We are confident that merchants who are up on our platform will not face any disruptions in services from January 1.
Is the industry prepared for tokenisation?
We are prepared and we are enabling a lot of merchants. As the deadline looms closer, merchants will have to adopt it sooner than later. We are just waiting for the ecosystem to start adopting it and enabling it because if they don't, then it's going to take a lot of time for merchants and consumers. We are confident all the major merchants will go live with it before the deadline kicks-in.
Are you looking to step into the cryptocurrency payments space?
We don’t support cryptos today and that is one of the reasons that we power 33 unicorns and not more. We are a regulated entity, we operate in the space of payment, we have to work closely with the regulator. We can't operate in a space that has no clear guidelines. There is a bill tabled in the Parliament, if that goes through and if it allows certain kinds of crypto payments and certain kinds of blockchain-based instruments to work, we will definitely look to support it. We will not do it until there is a clear law and clear guidelines in place on what is allowed and what is not allowed.
Are you considering an initial public offering any time soon?
We are a well capitalised company, we don't have any specific need for strong liquidity right now, which is what IPOs bring in. Our investors are there for the long term. We are making a lot of long-term bets right now in banking and lending in particular. From a payments perspective, we are almost breaking even and we could go public if we wanted to as a payments company. But our goal is to be a full-stack financial services company and I think we're at least two to three years away from that. So that's when we'll consider an IPO. We are at least two to three years away from it.
How do you see the adoption of digital payments in tier 3 and smaller towns?
Our goal is to enable small businesses and start-ups to be able to accept digital payments. We launched our no-code platform last year, which enables small business owners to accept payments through just a link. That's one of our fastest-growing works today. I think a lot of work is underway on digital payments and the Reserve Bank of India is also coming with a lot of regulations. Industry players like us are doing a lot of things, consumers are pushing the merchants. We are very confident that in the next one or two years, the ecosystem will be more digital than where it is today.