Sharp focus on category specific product development helps achieve this milestone, a rare achievement amongst fintech companies in India
- Innoviti, a leading provider of intelligent payment solutions, announced that for the month of September 2020 it has turned EBITDA positive. The company had set a December 2020 timeline for this target and has achieved it three months in advance. Innoviti had raised Series C earlier this year to further its differentiated strategy of category specific product and market development. Break-even is the outcome of this strategy, driven by the dual impact of revenue increase and cost rationalization.
- Innoviti is in the business of creating software that turns payment transactions into business collaborations. By bringing banks, brands, and merchants to partner, discover and delight their common consumers with superior offers at the point of payment, Innoviti is helping businesses accelerate sales with shared costs, driving a more profitable growth than possible with conventional means.
- Revenue increase has come on the back of a) several enterprise customers migrating to Innoviti as they embrace digital solutions to drive growth and efficiency beyond mere payment terminals, and b) crafting of a new product for small electronic merchants that enables them to design their own affordability schemes, helping them drive their business in their own unique ways. Revenue has doubled in the past 4 months.
- Cost rationalization has been brought about through deep investments in setting up of warehouses and automating supply chain and support system to dramatically rationalize costs, while enhancing customer experience. This has resulted in a 9% improvement in gross margins.
- Innoviti has also improved the payback on its new customer acquisition through changed distribution models that not only provide for faster reach but also better capital efficiency. The payback has reduced from 14 months to 3 months.
- Over the next six months the company will be focusing on a rapid expansion in the electronics category through a slew of product launches with an aim to take its current market share from 10% to 25%. In line are enhancements to a) enable merchants to extend DIY benefits from physical retail to online channels, b) expand merchant reach from current 100+ cities to 500+ cities, and c) expand lender base to expand consumer choice through a channel independent installment platform.
- With EBITDA break-even the company has also reversed the salary cuts put in place in March 2020 in response to the disruption caused by the COVID pandemic. From October 2020 the salaries as of March 2020 are being reinstated. Buoyed by the rapid growth, the company has also announced an aggressive incentive plan for the team.
Quotes:
“We are a software company that is turning payment transactions into business collaborations. Unlike typical payment networks that connected a buyer to a seller, we connect multiple sellers (bank, brand, and merchants) to a common consumer. Sellers who talk to the same consumer but have no easy way to talk to each other. We enable businesses to collaborate and discover new and unique ways of delighting their common consumer through superior offers delivered with shared costs. This is unique! A small merchant can collaborate with large banks with the same ease and flexibility the way a large merchant does. A large bank can partner with a large merchant on a transparent basis, discovering the best pricing, without biases coming in the way.
As an equal opportunity unbiased network, we are creating collaboration at a common moment of truth for all businesses – the point of payment. There cannot be a purer way for businesses to evaluate the impact of what we are bringing together.
Our category specific approach is driving unique and differentiated experiences right through the customer journey – when they buy the product, when they use the product and when they need support. Current affordability products in electronics category cater to less than 30% of the demand. There was a crying need to unbottle this through product innovation, we are happy to see that our recent product launches have been received well by the market.
We were planning to hit EBITDA break-even in March 2020, however the pandemic hit. We had to cut salaries and along with the team we agreed that the month we hit EBITDA break-even we would reverse the cut. We also agreed that we need to do this no later than December 2020. It is exciting to see that we achieved the target 3 months in advance.
We believe we are entering into a sustained hyper-growth phase over the next few quarters. We are excited and confident of leaping and leading in this market.”
– said Mr. Rajeev Agrawal, CEO, Innoviti.
About Innoviti Technologies Pvt. Ltd., Bangalore, India.
https://innoviti.com/
Innoviti Technologies Pvt. Ltd. has been a pioneer in the use of technology to add intelligence to payment transactions helping merchants, banks and brands utilize the full power of digital payments to drive business growth. The company processes over 6.5B$ of merchant payments from over 1000+ cities with a volume throughput per installation that is 2X of the country’s average. Catamaran Ventures, SBI Capital, Bessemer Ventures and FMO are investors in the company. The company has several patents filed for with two awarded. Innoviti is the winner of Mastercard’s Innovation Wizards Award for its instant onboarding innovation, and Reliance’s Most Promising Growth Consumer Finance Award for its #KuchBhiOnEMI innovation in 2019. Innoviti is the only Indian payments SaaS company to be awarded the SOC3 seal of excellence for adherence to principles of trust in privacy, security, confidentiality, availability, and processing of transactions.