Fintech has emerged as one of the fastest-growing sectors in the Indian startup ecosystem over the past few years, wherein, UPI is leading the charges. After UPI, Cards are one of the most convenient ways of digital payment mode in the industry. Cards are the most desirable format of payments in various customer segments. Currently, the opportunity to convert cash/cheque to a more efficient mode of digital transactions like the card is around USD 1.5Tn. Post-COVID 19 effect, the dependence on digital payment solutions is further going to be massive.

Significantly, one of the fastest flourishing Bengaluru based companies is Card91, cofounded in 2020 by Ajay Pandey, Kush Srivastava, and Vineet Saxena with the vision to provide payment infrastructure for the various businesses. Card91 is simplifying business payments by providing a plug-and-play issuance infrastructure to businesses for domestic and cross-border payments. The platform aims to provide holistic solutions around payment issuance and distribution management.

Some of the key features of the platform include Payment Issuance, Business Dashboard for issuance, distribution & control, Open API & Sandbox, Real-Time Control on Transactions via dynamic rules, Web & Mobile Interface, AML checks & Fraud Prevention, and Ancillary products like Recon, Accounting, Taxation, and many more. “Our deep focus in payments will help us in

bringing new issuance formats as well as technologies to businesses,” signifies Ajay.

Card91 platform consists of payment issuance and distribution dashboard as key offerings. Businesses can join the platform in the sandbox mode, integrate their core system, test their payment use case, do KYB, and take the system to life. The firm has an excellent self-serve portal for businesses to start creating payment use cases right away. Also, the firm has an experienced support team, in case businesses need some help in formulating the use case. Once live, businesses can start issuing the payment instruments, set rules, and observe transaction data in real-time. “We are creating a seamless experience for businesses to devise and run their payment use cases,” signifies Vineet.

Card91, from day one, has taken the technology-centric approach to solving the payment ecosystem problem. Card91 firmly believes that nimble, new age, and scalable infrastructure and technology are the key to transform the business payments landscape. Card91’s technology stack is a mix of few heavyweights like “java” and also new age languages like “goLang”. Its payment stack is primarily written in java with multiple plug-in plug-out modules to have a vertically and horizontally distributed system. Its APIs’ and the dashboard’s stack are on technologies like go Lang and vue.js along with its mobile apps (white label) written in flutter.

Simplifying business payments by providing a plug-and-play issuance infrastructure to businesses for domestic and cross-border payments

Card91 is a PCI-DSS v3.2.1 & ISO 27001-2013 compliant architecture and hence there are quite a few compliances that its architecture, code, deployment has to undertake. “We are very proud of the one click (multiple cloud provider) deployment model that we have written in-house which makes service discovery and orchestration pretty easy,” signifies Kush. Card91 is a year old company that recently came out of stealth, the clients that the firm is going to be live with are Livspace, Easy, and Jumbotail. In the future, Card91 will continue to be an issuance focus company with the core value proposition of enabling business issue payment instruments. The firm has started with Prepaid but soon wants to get into other formats like UPI, Credit Card, and many more. In conjunction with the issuance, the firm wants to develop ancillary systems, support tools to make payments easy for any business taking away the complexity of recon, accounting, taxation, and more. With these capabilities, the firm is looking forward to expanding its market in several geographies including India, SEA, and GCC.