A Desk To Process All Bills And Payments, | Print | Online

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Technovators Written by Vandana Sharma Here is an electronic payment platform that, the company claims, is the only one that integrates multiple payment and settlement options into one unified platform for processing transactions in real-time. No wonder firms from virtually every vertical are turning to this desk! "Technology has enabled us to generate knowledge that leads to the discovery and exploitation of new business opportunities," John Kao wrote in his book Jamming: The Art & Discipline of Business Creativity. BillDesk, a unified platform that delivers and manages specialised electronic payments and remittance solutions for its clients, aims to do just that. In 2000, the founders of BillDesk, M.N. Srinivasu, Ajay Kaushal and Karthik Ganapathy, colleagues at Arthur Andersen and alumni of IIM-A, IIM-L and IIM-B respectively, recognised the opportunities that rapid changes in the banking and payments sector would create for entrepreneurial initiatives. And thus BillDesk came into being. Its business model and the technological superiority of the applications that the platform offers have made it a winner in less than a decade. Elaborating on the most innovative aspect of the platform, M.N. Srinivasu, co-founder and chairman, BillDesk, says, "The key aspect of any innovation is the utility and beneficial value that it renders to users and the eco-system. The unique advantage that the BillDesk platform offers to its clients is that it integrates multiple payment and settlement options into one unified platform." "The option of the unified BillDesk platform essentially means that today, a company can offer to its customers the option of paying online using any Visa, MasterCard, Diners or American Express credit card, cash cards, or through any Internet banking account. Alternately, it offers its customers the option of having cyclical payments made automatically by electronic debit to any of bank/card accounts. BillDesk is the only unified platform in the country that offers this range of electronic payment collection options to any entity." In the absence of the BillDesk platform, any entity seeking to offer electronic payments/collections services would have to integrate independently with each bank, each card settlement network, and each

payment system. In addition, the company or service provider would have to, on a daily basis, deal with transactional operational workflows. Similarly, any bank seeking to offer comprehensive electronic payments services to its customers would have to, in the absence of the BillDesk platform, integrate independently with each billing entity across each of its channels, and deal with multiple entities on a daily basis for the transactional operational workflows. To this Srinivasu adds, "From a marketplace perspective, this has been one of the most significant innovations -- virtually a 'category-creator', as it enabled banks/entities to offer comprehensive electronic payment services to their customers." "From a marketplace perspective, this has been one of the most significant innovations -- virtually a 'category-creator', as it enabled banks/entities to offer comprehensive electronic payment services to their customers." The defining aspects of the BillDesk platform have been interoperability and flexibility. This has allowed BillDesk to meet differing and evolving client needs, and yet retain a common services implementation. Importantly, this interoperability and flexibility is what has aided various players in their decision to offer electronic payments and remittance solutions to their customers. BillDesk combines leading-edge technology with extensive domain expertise to offer payments and remittance management and transaction-processing solutions for both traditional and online businesses. The shift The era of online transactions has finally arrived-- and that too, in a big way! To BillDesk's advantage, more and more companies have begun to offer electronic transaction facilities to their customers and partners, taking advantage of the shift in the people's attitudes' especially those who have begun to enjoy the convenience of transacting electronically and over the Web. Whether it is in banking, telecom, insurance, utilities or financial services-- all firms are adding electronic payment and remittance options to their businesses, and offering it to their customers. And handling the processing and back-end operations for most is BillDesk, which operates as a neutral service bureau aggregating multiple banks, billing companies and other corporations onto a common standards-based platform for delivering electronic payments and collection services across multiple electronic channels. Procedure for processing transactions

So how does the platform process transactions? Srinivasu explains, "Each transaction is a combination of various business events that are eventually mapped to software services. For instance, consider a large telecom player, where typically a Web-based payment transaction flow would be as follows:

A customer initiates a payment at the telecom company website. The customer has the option to pay via credit card, cash cards, or direct debit to a bank account. The customer can also use various other 'transaction interfaces'-i.e., an ATM or phone banking option, or the Internet banking channel of various banks. The telecom company has pan-India operations across over 20 states, and has distributed circle-wise system/data distribution. Thus, customer payment has to be updated to the billing systems of each circle on a 'real-time' basis-- i.e., instant payment updation. Reconciliation/settlement of funds requires to be done for each circle in a consolidated manner and a single settlement per day [this means that various payment methods require to be aggregated and the telecom company is transparent to the customer debit source].

As you can see, the above transaction scenario implies that the technology platform needs to provide a seamless end-to-end customer experience for the telecom company. Furthermore, the system requires a 100 per cent posting efficiency. To achieve this experience, internally the entire transaction scenario gets broken down into a series of well-defined services. Multiple transactions on-the-fly! The payment infrastructure is implemented to cover high transaction loads, and works in a secure manner, as required for a financial transaction-processing environment. Srinivasu explains, "Managing high transaction volumes is a continuous process, and is done based on assessing the nature of the load on each individual service. The load could be in the form of online activity on the system, or the need to process a large batch of transactions, or a very large data transfer. BillDesk achieves these objectives through standardised services, segregation between online and offline transactions, customer-side and internal business functions, and appropriate sizing of the physical infrastructure."

According to Srinivasu, a key aspect of BillDesk infrastructure that aids in managing the transaction load is a three-tier architecture that separates the various processing layers-- Web, application and database. This is what helps manage the scale-up in transaction volumes. The service-oriented architecture (SOA) also allows different applications to exchange data and participate in business processes. Various business functions are defined as standard services that can be flexibly deployed across different customer workflows. As Srinivasu explains, "For instance, a payment transaction gets divided into multiple service flows-- capturing of data, payment processing, effecting a debit, managing notification events, sending out notifications, monitoring of service, and reconciliation of transactions. Each event has a specific role, and interacts with various other services in a standard manner to retain the overall sanctity of the transaction. Dividing the business functions also makes them separate units-- these can then be distributed over a network, and can be combined or reused to create business applications." Using this fundamental design principle, BillDesk has merged various protocols including XML (extensible markup language), SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), ISO 8583, plain text, etc, to create a commonmessage-based framework for clients and businesses to interact and manage their payment needs. It extensively uses Java to create the services, and deploys other channel-specific technologies such as C++, Visual Basic and J2ME to serve client applications. BillDesk uses enterprise-class Sun servers and Oracle as the database, to ensure superior performance and high availability. Data security For any online payment enabled portal, security is the key issue. So what makes BillDesk win the trust of its clients? Srinivasu describes the security armour of the platform, "In managing data for large banks/ financial institutions/ businesses, the key aspects addressed by BillDesk are confidentiality, integrity and availability (CIA) of data. BillDesk's three-tier architecture ensures security and safeguards the data in a database, behind dedicated firewalls. Extremely sensitive information is stored in an encrypted manner within the database, using standard PCI (payment card industry) guidelines. In addition, standards-based information security frameworks have been implemented, incorporating various policies and procedures pertaining to data management. These include procedures for data access and use, data storage, data

disposal, data back-up and implementation of a disaster recovery site." To innovate is to add to the value-chain BillDesk and its founders have always believed that innovation is a continuous process; incremental innovations delivered successfully and efficiently are the true value creators. BillDesk's biggest innovation perhaps has been in its business and service delivery model that is based on partnering with clients. This approach has helped the company build a highly unified platform across various payments and settlements systems, and to render an absolutely unique level of aggregation services to clients. Importantly, it also created the necessary foundation for BillDesk to be able to work on product and process innovations for its clients on a continuous basis. As Srinivasu reveals, "The fundamental aspect of any 'innovation' lies in the utility and value that it provides; in an enterprise context, for an innovation to be relevant, it needs to lend itself to being harnessed into a competitive, commercially successful sustainable proposition." According to him, the fundamental philosophy of the company has been that 'innovation' needs to be:

Market-facing Result in increased value for the end-user Delivered efficiently.

"As a service organisation managing various business and technical processes relating to payments and collections, any innovation in service delivery and operations, directly translates to value for the clients and for us. Given this, we constantly encourage people to bring improvements to the process delivery, and this is done across the board, at every stage and through the entire value chain," reveals Srinivasu. Let's join hands The company is a firm believer that collaborating to innovate is extremely essential in today's highly informed marketplace. For an innovation to be successful, it needs to move from merely being an invention to finding application in the market place. As Srinivasu affirms, "Speed to market introduction, incremental improvements, and continuous enhancements are all essential aspects of a 'successful innovation'; and collaborating toward such delivery not only increases the chances of such innovation finding greater acceptance, but also

improves the profitability of such delivery." Looking back with pride Owing to its innovative business model, BillDesk has today managed to win clients from several different verticals. The success of the firm can be gauged by the fact that over 40 of the largest banks and about 200 of the largest institutions in India, including the leading telecom companies, insurance companies and mutual funds, all use the BillDesk platform for their electronic payments and collections needs. The company today has offices across 35 cities in the country. But the team has had its share of rough patches and challenges in this journey. As Srinivasu recounts, "The year 2000 was not the easiest to begin a new venture, in terms of the overall downturn in the financial markets and the tightening of capital resources available for new ventures." In addition, the business model that BillDesk was taking to the marketplace-- that of a collaborative, partnership-based platform/service delivery-- was new to the constituents in the domain; getting acceptance for a start-up venture posed its own challenges. Also, at that point in time, Internet/broadband penetration and electronic banking facilities were all at nascent stages. This lack of robust infrastructure in the relevant ecosystem also posed challenges in terms of pace of consumer adoption for the electronic payment services. However, these very challenges gave rise to the opportunity to create a large unified platform, across verticals and channels. In fact, this in latter years, turned out to be BillDesk's greatest strength, and provided it with a distinct competitive advantage in the marketplace. Today, one can say that for Srinivasu and the rest of the team behind BillDesk, being farsighted has really paid off!