ftcash

One of India's fastest growing financial inclusion venture, aiming to empower micro-merchants and small-businesses through loans using digital payments

Every year, millions of people around the world fall into poverty due to health problems, financial setbacks, and other shocks. Compounding this situation is the fact that the majority of those living in or near poverty lack even the most basic banking services. Effective tools for saving, sending, and borrowing money and mitigating financial risks can help people weather setbacks and achieve greater financial stability over the long term.

Most poor households operate almost entirely in the cash economy, particularly in the developing world. This means they use cash, physical assets, or informal providers (such as money lenders) to meet their financial needs. However, these informal mechanisms can be insecure, expensive, and complicated to use. And they offer limited recourse when a major problem arises, such as a serious illness in the family or a poor harvest.

There are 60+ milion small-merchants and less than 4% have access to credit. ftcash aims to empower these small-merchants through financial inclusion using loans based cash flow from ftcash digital payment solution. ftcash uses its proprietary algorithm to understand the credit-worthiness using their transaction flow data on payments platform along with several other data points including psychometric analysis, which can be leveraged to provide these underserved SMEs with institutional finance. After disbursement of loans, the collections is done using the payments platform for their future receivables. The company was launched in Mumbai, India in mid-2015. It was incubated by PayPal and is currently in a strategic partnership with MasterCard to enable merchant services globally.

While there are multiple players like PayZapp, Paytm etc in the payments space. We are an open platform that incorporates all payment methods that include credit/debit cards, wallets etc to become the one stop solution for all the payment needs of the merchant.

Players like Capital Float and Neogrowth provide loans to small merchants in India but do not own the the data which is used to provide these loans and they as they do not have their a payments system to recollect the loans as well.

ftcash provides a software and hardware based full-stack payment solution to small merchants to initiate digital payments in less than 5 minutes. In addition, ftcash uses its proprietary algorithm to understand the credit-worthiness using their transaction flow data on the payments platform along with several other data points including psychometric analysis, which can be leveraged to provide these underserved SMEs with institutional finance. After disbursement of loans, the collections is done using the payments platform for their future receivables.

Organizational Goals over Next One Year:
1. Digitizing end to end loan processing, disbursal and collection
2. Use of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to improve risk assessment
3. Build team to reach create a loan book of $50 million

ftcash will be the enabler for over 1 million micro-merchants in the next 5 years to accept electronic payments and access to institutional finance, capturing a formerly ignored market--the micro-merchants (urban poor)--by creating a more efficient and convenient way to access bank accounts. Traditional mass-market saving accounts often exlude unbanked clients after they open an account. The effect is that roughly half of basic bank accounts lie dormant. ftcash enables that financial inclusion provides social and economic justice to these underserved communities. Improved cash flows, better cash management and purchasing ability provides a base of a just society.

Target Customers: Micro-merchants, Micro-Entrepreneurs, Businesses, SMEs and Retailers
Number of Target Customers: Organized: 60 million + Unorganized: 200 million+
India has 60+ million micro-merchants and small businesses. Less than 4% of merchants have a PoS/Swipe machines, and most have no alternatives to accepting cash. Nearly 98% of small & micro merchants don't have access to institutional finance and rely on distributors or money lenders to finance them. Many micro-merchants take out loans with exorbitant rates by devious money lenders because they don't have access to banks and NBFCs as they do not have any credit history or collateral.

1. Impact to number of families: Over 150,000
2. Number of Merchants: Over 30,000
3. Volume of Transactions and Loans: USD 80 million yearly.
4. Delinquency on Loans: 1.7%
5. Effective use of funds for the purpose stated.: Tracking of each loan to understand the use of loans and their repayments on a daily basis. Currently, based on value of transactions digitally, ftcash has observed a rise in 30% income on yearly basis to a merchant provided loans above Rs. 100,000.

Sanjeev Chandak: previous Dy. CFO, Deutsche Bank in India. 17+ years Director Capital One and led various initiatives in marketing, credit policy, etc. MBA Wharton School of Business and an engineer IIT Kharagpur.


Deepak Kothari: decade of experience working as a management consultant and associated with various strategy related projects with Fortune 500 companies as a Senior Manager with KPMG and Grant Thornton. Chartered Accountant by profession and graduated from Shree Ram College of Commerce, New Delhi


Vaibhav Lodha: PRIOR Director with XPRIZE in India and previously been associated with The World Bank, LGT Ventures and Lodha Group. Harvard University.

1. Feet on Street

ftcash seeds each city/market with about 10 sales representatives to start with. Based on the initial response from the market the team is scaled. The sales representatives apart from acquiring the first few sets of merchants also acquire channel partners/distributors in the area.

2. Channel Partners / Distributors

Cost-effective mode of merchant acquisition for payments or loans by charge only on success fees and often have deep understanding of the local market landscape. ftcash works with distributors / wholesalers to provide credit to their network of retailers as well.

3. Corporate and Banking Alliances

Several large corporates and banks to acquire merchants to enable digital payments and loans. During our pilot study with a large corporate conglomerate, we could highlight that a combination of payments and loans in their distributor cycle enables better cash flows, higher sales and time savings of the sales team up to 3 hours a day.

4. Marketing

ftcash so far has had zero marketing budget. However, we do see that effective use of in-house calling teams, referral programs etc. help scale the business. PR and ads in vernacular newspapers helps reach out to the small segments of these merchants as well as social media.

1. Lending based Platform

The ftcash lending platform uses its proprietary algorithm for lending to small merchants. The current process involves manual intervention at several levels from on-boarding to collections. ftcash would like to automate the end to end process and make it API driven to enable swifter integration and disbursal through partner NBFCs.

2. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

ftcash gathers large amount of data on merchants during from mobile phones. It plans to implement a layer of machine learning to better predict risk associated with payment and loan transactions.

3. ftcash would use Solve's support to scale operations and merchants acquisition

1. Execution Failure to scale the current processes, business and culture
2. Inability to communicate the vision and mission to internal and external stakeholders (low employee morale, lower customer retention and/or disinterest from investors)
3. Lack of Funds to scale operations

Mitigation Strategy:
1. Training and Hiring right team with experience in scaling business.
2. Each Co-founder works with their respective teams to ensure internal communication of vision and mission.
3. Have a backup from IvyCap Ventures to scale our business. Apart from that, in conversation with 2 impact investment funds and 1 sovereign fund to fundraise to scale business.