THE FINTECH CHANAKYA SHIBABRATA BHAUMIK ENTERS INDIA AT THE MOST OPPORTUNE TIME
by Shibabrata Bhaumik I’m an Entrepreneur, Angel Investor & a PhilanthroFintech lending began to emerge in India around 2014 and
soon mushroomed into a rapidly expanding ecosystem. But what is missed is the extent to which
the rise of fintech has catalysed broader changes in the economy. Fintech will
help unlock Bharat and India will emerge as cashless economy and
enhancing financial inclusion.
The
game of entrepreneurship has changed substantially during COVID19 and players
have to change their game plan post COVID19.
Today
we feature, the success story of London based Fintech Start PayQ which has
grown exponentially on adoption of new territory starting from United Kingdom
to diversifying its merchant acquisition to European Union and then stepping to
Indian Market and its founder Shibabrata Bhaumik who is at the interesting
crossroad with economic growth slowing down and consumer demand in India got
tempered.
PayQ’s
entry to India comes at a very opportune time. During the lockdown, several
questions have been raised about the readiness of the Indian grassroots system
to allow its small businesses to participate in an end-to-end digital ecosystem
that powers content, transactions and finally, payments and fulfillment. With
this one move, PayQ have clearly sent out signals to take on the giants in the
payments, content and ecommerce spaces, simultaneously.
PayQ’s digital payment platform also includes digital billing
to even geotagging, Shibabrata believes that merchant digitization business
will boom when the lockdown eases. PayQ also deals with merchant account for high
risk businesses like payment
gateway for tech support, Merchant
account for Pharmacy and aims to go beyond the traditional payment
method to revolutionize the e-commerce industry.
While Paytm, Google Pay, Naspers-owned PayU and other
players were aggressively trying to rope in small businesses on their platform,
as B2B doesn't bleed the business, the big scramble is
for over 60 million small businesses. PayQ and Shibabrata is
trying to get them hooked to the PayQ payment gateway and then offering them a
host of services, including loans, and easy payment acceptance and settlement
to small businesses incuding Kirana shops and that would lead to an intense
battle, where incumbents could face the heat.
In
style and philosophy, Shibabrata Bhaumik, the
36-year-old founder and CEO of PayQ, is in the camp of the financial
anarchists. He sits, jammed alongside Developers, Payment Technology Experts
and Data Scientists, in a row of tiny desks resembling library carrels and he
prefers to sit and work with the team around their desk not like a typical CEO
with fancy cabin. He wears a black Business Tuxedo, Classic Red and Black Check
Tie, black pants and gloss polished black formal shoes. He talks about a brave
new world in which we are liberated from the shackles of giant banks and
government-controlled money supplies. The CEO of PayQ, Shibabrata Bhaumik is a young first generation
entrepreneur, who has developed application programme interfaces (APIs) for
India’s ambitious Unified Payments Interface (UPI), it has been an enriching
experience. “Working with the government is not so difficult,” he says. “Your
credibility depends on your delivery of performance. The payments landscape is going
to change fundamentally".
During
an expansive interview, this usually reserved and the press-shy entrepreneur
declares why he got into this business: “I wanted the world to have a global,
open financial system that drove innovation and freedom.” In the following
business model, though, Shibabrata fits in with the pinstriped financiers
working down the block.
Born
at Kolkata, India to an engineer Father, Shibabrata displayed an
entrepreneurial streak as early as grade school. He recalls being hauled into
the principal’s office on charges of operating a candy-reselling venture on the
playground. The business flings continued with a scheme
to resell used computers and, after he earned a master’s degree in 2006 in
International Business.
In
2012, Shibabrata read the manifesto by a European Union Bank that proposed card
payments of Visa, Mastercard & the future Fintech companies will have
limitless possibilities and bitcoin as an underground currency. Its
transactions are recorded on a ledger called the blockchain, maintained in
duplicated computer files by a band of self-appointed guardians called nodes.
The nodes are kept honest, and troublemakers at bay, by requiring a participant
in the network to engage in some arithmetic busywork before certifying a batch
of transactions.
The
busywork, called mining, did not interest Shibabrata. But he did see an
opportunity in the business of safeguarding the keys to the coins and setting
up transactions. Working weekends and late nights,
Shibabrata and his Developing Team created a Payment gateway to process high
volume transactions and connected the nodes with the acquiring bank and
launched the first payment portal in 2014 later sold it an EU Bank.
Few
Venture capitalists from Russia and Germany, showered 5 million USD on
Shibabrta’s innovative approach in 2017 and motivated him to create PayQ, a
unique high-risk merchant account company whish uses cryptocurrencies and
blockchains to build transaction networks for corporations.
Crypto
has been condemned as rat poison by Warren Buffett, as a fraud by Jamie Dimon
and the mother of all scams by doomsday economist Nouriel Roubini. Where’s the
payoff to the economy?
It’s
coming, Bhaumik says. He posits a future in which thousands of startups use
crypto to raise capital in a global marketplace no longer controlled by Wall
Street firms. Within a decade, he predicts, the number of people participating
in the blockchain economy will explode from 50 million to 1 billion. We are
destined to enjoy a financial system that is “more global, more fair, more free
and more efficient”
News
Source :
FORBES-UK Fintech PayQ uses sandboxes for Digital loans to Kiranas
HINDUSTAN
TIMES-Fintech start-up PayQ, led by Chanakya Shibabrata Bhaumik, enters India
LOKMAT
NEWS-PayQ Power SMEs to Kirana, enables digital billing to Geo tagging
YAHOO
NEWS- PayQ Power SMEs to Kirana, enables digital billing to Geo tagging
ANI
NEWS-PayQ Power SMEs to Kirana, enables digital billing to Geo tagging
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Created on May 25th 2020 06:16. Viewed 286 times.