“Only 75% success rate with payment transactions is unacceptable,”Upasana Taku, Founder, ZaakPay

While working on Mobikwik.com, an online mobile recharge website, Upasana and Co-founder Bipin, faced a problem which was and still is prevalent- setting up payment gateways seamlessly. It is not easy to decide and setup a gateway to use in India; the companies need to undergo a rigmarole involving paperwork and rather inefficient processes. And to top it off, it is one costly affair. “I found a big gap in this segment and noticed that each e-commerce company was reinventing the wheel in-house to manage the problem,” says Upasana Taku, founder at Zaakpay.Funded in late 2011, a sequoia backed company, Zaakpay has two products to offer- Webpay and Bankpay, making Zaakpay a complete online payments solutions provider. Webpay has a simple four step procedure to setup the payment gateway.

The pricing for Zaakpay is lucrative with a free trial that simulates the transaction in a sandbox environment. For startups, there is a one-time account fee of INR 5000. Any company with transaction volumes under INR 5 lakhs per month falls under this category and will have to bear a 3% card transaction rate along with an INR 500 monthly subscription fee. There are other options, ‘Business’ and ‘Enterprise’ for higher volumes.

Other than Webpay, Zaakpay also offers Bankpay. Bankpay helps one manage his/her online and offline onetime and recurring payments but it is not live yet.“The payment transaction success rates stand at a woeful 75% in India as opposed to 95% in the western countries,” says Upasana. Zaakpay aims to better this rate. Based out of New Delhi, Zaakpay has a team of 7 trying to make a difference in this market which is still not customer-driven. The funding that Zaakpay raised has been used to sign up deals with banks, hire talent and run PCIDSS certified servers. A few key points Zaakpay kept in mind while designing the product were:

• Inbuilt analysis: Zaakpay provides complete analysis of a customer’s actions on a client’s payment page as to the point till which he went, where did the transaction fail and other intricacies.
• Security: Nothing is a 100 percent full proof. The biggest payment gateway in India, CCAvenue, was hacked about a year ago and something like this can totally ruin it for both parties, the client and the gateway provider. Keeping this in mind, Zaakpay has been taking baby steps and building a strong shield to ensure high security.
• The Process: A company doesn’t need many people to solve a problem believes Upasana. In case of a payment gateway provider, one needs to be prompt and accurate when it comes to customer service and this entails very well laid out processes.

Having taken into account all these factors, Zaakpay has been cautiously brought to the market. Zaakpay powers four sites as of now (including themselves) and have more than 100 merchants who have already signed up. Looking at the rate of adoption, one would be seeing a lot of Zaakpay in the near future.

Zaakpay is hiring and looking for a risk scientist and a developer community manager more about them on the website.