Got your fee challan for the month? Dreading a trip to the bank? Don’t want to miss the fee deadline? Imagine all your bills paid on time without stepping out of your home and not just the utility bills but all of your recurring payments.

No need to go collect the paper challan, then withdraw cash and pay at a specific branch. Well, at least that’s what this Karachi-based tech startup claims to offer: simpler bill payments.

ConnectPay is an online bill presentment system that simply fetches your invoices in a digital format straight on your online banking portal and lets you pay directly. All you have to do is access your bank’s website/app/ATM or any other alternative delivery channel, add ConnectPay as the biller, enter your invoice ID (provided by the biller) and they will automatically show you an e-bill which can be directly paid from there. Once that is done, ConnectPay will update the biller that the payment has been successfully completed.

Needless to say, this works only with partner banks and organisations – a network ConnectPay is trying to grow fast. Within a month of soft launch, their solution is live on Meezan Bank and Bank of Punjab while 14 corporate clients are already on board. To expand on that front, the company is brokering partnerships with local players in Lahore and Islamabad.

Let’s stop here for a minute. There are many digital wallets that claim to offer similar solutions so why would one need ConnectPay in the first place. Well, the primary difference is the target market.

“Most of the wallets are keen on capturing the consumer-to-consumer or business-to-consumer segments. They want you to download their app and go cashless. That’s not our offering! We don’t tell you to sign up on a new app or anything: ConnectPay links up with your bank instead so it’s more of an intermediary,” said the company’s Chief Executive Asif Hassan.

Asif’s primary focus is on the business-to-business segment where he feels there is a huge need for such a solution. Most companies with wide distribution networks depend on outdated paper invoices and ConnectPay wants to digitise exactly that. “The current cheque-based payment system has lots of lags like weekends and clearance time. And for a small distributor who needs to make advance payments to get his goods delivered, these lags mean lost sales. We are offering to resolve that bottleneck,” he explains.

But corporates are not the only frontier. The company is also eyeing educational institutes, social clubs among others working on paper challans who are not big enough to be listed by the banks for online payment. “As a father, I know how painful it is to pay my kids’ fees and this is a widespread problem but no one at the moment is really addressing this segment,” the CEO notes.

Forget digital wallets, a lot of what ConnectPay is offering can easily be done by big banks like HBL or UBL. In other words, they don’t exactly need an intermediary for this payment solution, right? Well, sort of.

“Sure, they can develop this tech on their own and market it as well and even integrate big schools or some multinationals on their system. But they don’t have the mandate to go after smaller players. I, on the other hand, can penetrate deeper and attract the small-scale 300-student montessori or mid-size distributors so it’s a win-win,” Asif says.

And even if these banks do enter the market and compete with ConnectPay, Asif doesn’t really see that as a threat to his business. “The pie is large enough for all of us to grab our share so the number of market participants doesn’t affect us,” he says.

ConnectPay’s parent company, THK Solutions, is a prominent software house, big in the business of developing custom applications for corporate clients. But now Asif wants to steer the company towards a broad-based consumer product.

The venture is funded by THK Solutions with a multi-tier revenue stream. For schools, there is a flat marginal fee while corporates are charged varied percentages depending on the transaction size. Moreover, an initial implementation fee is also being considered and will be introduced over time.

But how will digitising business-to-business transactions help ConnectPay become a game changer in the payments market? Asif is mindful of the fact but he believes that B2B relationships will help increase the overall market size and reach in the long run. “The consumer market is obviously our target market since it has the most juice but we want to first consolidate a position in this segment. It’s more of a top-down strategy, starting from corporates then trickling down to masses,” he notes.

As for the data, then there is not much ConnectPay handles in the first place. “We are merely an aggregator and all your personal data stays with the banks since we only deal with customer’s invoicing history,” the CEO claims.

ConnectPay’s success hinges on the company’s ability to replace the paper-based bills and invoices with e-bills and that only depends on the degree to which they are able to penetrate the market.

The writer is member of staff:

m.mutaherkhan@gmail.com

Twitter: @MutaherKhan

Published in Dawn, September 30th, 2018