In a bid to make payment management easier for businesses, payments and API banking company Cashfree Payments has launched a self-hosted payments orchestration platform, FlowWise. The platform’s self-hosting feature claims to eliminate safety concerns, making it a secure solution for merchants.
Akash Sinha, Co-founder & CEO, Cashfree Payments, says FlowWise is a single-point payments management solution for India’s digital-first businesses. “Companies and brands in India still expend time and effort to optimise their inward digital revenue flow for scale and conversion. This is why we built FlowWise, so businesses will have a no-code solution to offer an enterprise-grade stack for collecting payments without any in-house effort and cost,” he states.
Cashfree Payments is integrated with platforms such as Shopify, Wix, Paypal, Amazon Pay, Paytm and Google Pay. Besides India, their solutions are available in eight countries, including the USA, Canada and the UAE. Founded by IIT-Hyderabad alumnus Akash Sinha and IIT-Kharagpur graduate Reeju Datta, the company processes transactions worth $40 billion annually.
Sinha adds that FlowWise will cover aspects such as a conversion-friendly checkout, higher success rates, lower costs, no-code management, analytics and settlements. He expects this solution to help businesses cut payment processing costs up to 40% and improve success rates by up to 10%.
He explains how such numbers would be an achievable target: “It enables businesses to have more control over which payment processor their payments are being routed to, unlocking their ability to leverage cost differentials between different processors. This helps in reducing the payment processing costs. In terms of operational costs and effort, FlowWise reduces the one-time cost of using multiple payment partners to a few clicks, cutting that cost down to zero.”
FlowWise tests the payment gateways where end-users experience negative outcomes to enhance switching and achieve a better success rate. The platform’s dashboard and analytics offer insights and settlement reconciliation across all payment aggregators.
Sinha adds that their offering is also expected to benefit small and medium businesses who are impacted by the cost of integration and managing multiple payment partners. “Integrating a new payment gateway via APIs usually takes 1-2 months and costs Rs 20-40 lakh, especially in business critical units such as software and front-end development. This is why many small and medium businesses make do with only one payment aggregator, or build sub-optimal checkout journeys that are not conversion-friendly. FlowWise solves these problems by taking the cost and effort of integrating new payment aggregators down to zero,” he says.
This, in turn, allows such businesses to gain the benefits of multiple payment aggregators, such as higher success rates, lower costs and a wider selection of payment modes.
Ramkumar Venkatesan, CTO, Cashfree Payments, says it would serve as the central intelligence for a merchant’s payment infrastructure. “Our engineering and data science teams have implemented machine learning algorithms to provide a secure orchestration experience for businesses and end customers. One of the best features of this product is that it simplifies the complex integrations and operates within the merchant’s infrastructure,” he adds.
