by Suman Gupta
Mumbai, February , 2020: YAP,the API platform company that powers the next generation of banking and payment products, announced its first financing round. A clutch of super angels led by Amrish Rau with participation from Jitendra Gupta Founder – Jupiter, Kunal Shah of CRED, Vikram Chachra, entrepreneur turned VC of 8i Ventures, Abhishant Pant – FinTechMeetUp & Peifu Hsieh of Karbon contributed to the INR 10 Crore round. The fast growing company is already profitable and plans to use the funds to accelerate growth, expand its team to develop new Banking products.
Many of the most discerning Fintechsin India including Ola, Cred, Bank Open, Niyo, Redcarpet, Slice and many others rely on YAP’s API’s to open new financial accounts, issue and process payments and co-create new products. The modular mobile first API platform is backed by leading banks including Yes Bank, DCB Bank, Equitas SFB, SBM Bank and allows companies to rapidly develop, test, iterate their own branded debit, credit and prepaid accounts.
Commenting on the capital raise Madhusudanan R, Co-founder, YAP said “We are at the center of API based Banking and Payments in India and look forward to scale (ing) our platform across Asia. We pride ourselves as the platform of choice for fintechs & businesses in India. The funding round by India’s leading fintech entrepreneurs is a terrific validation of our model.
As of December 2019, the company processed over $ 2 billion in annual payments andover 50 million transactions, a 300% growth over the previous year. With 200+fintech engagements, the funding allows the company to develop API Banking capabilities to attract new Fintech players and build on the momentum.
Amrish Rau, who joins the company’s board added, one of the most cumbersome part for any Fintech journey is the bank platforms integration and development of core payments and card technologies. YAP has already built the bank integration pipes and provided this in an easy to use microservices architecture, which can be consumed by any Fintech.
India is poised for exponential growth in digital payments over the next few years. A KPMG report: Fintech in India – Powering mobile payments sees the mobile payment revolution with its evolving form factors has led to a boom in the number of merchants adopting digital payments. From close to 1.5 million digital payment acceptance locations in 2016-17, the number of merchants accepting digital payments modes has increased to over 10 million, in a short span of two to three years. The global digital payments market is expected to touch $10.07 trillion by 2026. This shift can be attributed to driving factors such as robust payment infrastructure, evolution of form factors, availability of structured data, shift in consumer behaviour and the government’s vision of transforming India into a cashless economy.”
