Digital Enterprises: Stepping stone for success of Digital India Mission

Digital is for everyone— Digital technologies enable us to reach a larger audience, interact with that audience in ways we couldn’t earlier, understand our stakeholders better, improve customer service, fuel innovation, and access information and insights that help us lead better lives and produce better results. Today, every part of the businesses is subject to new expectations, competitors, channels, threats, and opportunities. Every enterprise has the potential to be a digital business.

Enterprises are transforming digitally will be able to connect more closely with their clients, speed up the pace of innovation and, as a result, claim a greater share of profit in their sectors. Today digitally transformed enterprises have an edge; tomorrow, only digital businesses will succeed.

A single business has the power to influence thousands of individuals to adopt digital means. Every business works with vendors. More operation heavy the business is, more the number of vendors that it deals with. A business with an employee size of 500 would deal with say around 50 - 200 vendors. So this business becomes the source of money for these 50 vendors. If the source is cashless, then 50 more businesses can adopt/accept cashless payments. 

The same business is also the source of income for 500 employees. If the business pays salaries only via digital modes [NEFT], all 500 employees are enabled to make cashless payments. These employees would further go ahead and purchase their daily need items from other business, thereby completing the cashless cycle. The vendors are businesses in themselves. 

Each one of the 50 vendors would have employees and vendors to make payments to. Hence, one business can effectively influence 1,000s of individuals to adopt cashless payments and the ripple effect cannot be ignored. If we want the consumers to embrace digital payments, first we have to equip the businesses that they work for and the businesses they deal with digital infrastructure.

Unleashing the potential of businesses by supporting them with the right digital infrastructure Majority of businesses transactions are still made in cash. There is a lack of transparency, extensive bookkeeping involved and long reconciliation time. Also, there is room for errors due to manual processes. Business processes take more time to complete as the physical movement of cash takes time.

To manage payments more effectively and efficiently, businesses need more than just vanilla current accounts and corporate cards that traditional banking offers. They need a next-generation technology platform that eliminates manual processes and brings in automation and mobility.  

What they need is - a single platform via which they can fund, track, report and reconcile payments, a platform that offers all the features that they need to manage expenses efficiently such as policies, workflows and other company specific-configurations; a platform that integrates seamlessly with their existing accounting and ERP software. 

There are rising fintech companies in India offering such cutting-edge solutions in the form of providing best in class corporate expense management cards that are linked to multiple wallets. That means a single piece of plastic can hold multiple pockets of money for different types of business payables such and Travel and Entertainment expenses, Petty cash/Imprest, Out-of-pocket employee reimbursements, employee benefits and allowances, etc. 

In partnership with banks, these solutions are ushering a new age of financial disruption, one that makes financial transactions smoother, faster and cheaper than ever before. Administrators can restrict the wallet spend to all channels like POS, ATM and online or to specific ones. They can easily track all wallet spends on a real-time basis via their web dashboard/mobile apps. 

Administrators can also load or remove funds from wallets with just a click of a button, at any time, from any device. They can also switch on or switch off a wallet. The ability to integrate a card platform with any of the existing systems used by customers (such as accounting, ERP, and HRMS among others) enables expanse management companies to manage these card programs effectively. API integration helps companies export spend data to their ERP and accounting systems without any hassles of manual data entry or errors.

Help enterprises go digital; this way, digital India will no longer be just a dream.

-- Varun Rathi, COO and Co-Founder, Happay.