Aim is to ease biz banking for every SME in India: Anish Achuthan
1 min read . Updated: 09 Oct 2019, 10:38 PM IST
PremiumThe Open platform enables businesses to collect payments, do seamless payouts, auto-reconcile and categorize income and expense, thereby automating book keeping, says co-founder and CEO Anish Achuthan
—Anish Achuthan, co-founder and chief executive officer of Open
During my time at PayU, I started evaluating ideas for my next business venture and it was then that I was struck by the tremendous opportunities in the fintech world. I wanted to create a unique proposition for the underserved small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) and startup community. I realized that managing business finances was one of the primary challenges faced by small and medium-sized enterprises. Banks were very much skewed in favour of big enterprises.
Although neobanks existed in the US and European markets, they were lacking in India, a market that caters to over 50 million small businesses. And therein came the idea to launch Open, a neobanking platform that combines banking, payments, expense management and accounting in one unified service. Open aims to transform business banking for small businesses by offering a business account in partnership with banks. The platform also enables businesses to collect payments, do seamless payouts, auto-reconcile and categorize income and expense, thereby automating book keeping.
Currently, we are serving more than 100,000 small and medium-sized enterprises on the platform and processing $5.5 billion in transactions annually. I was lucky enough to cross paths with global investors who believed in Open’s proposition enough to back me up. In fact, one of our investors has a background with leading neobanks in Europe and believed that the time was right to bring neobanking to India. We have also raised over $35 million in equity funding from investors such as Tiger Global Management and Tanglin Venture Partners. My co-founders and I shared a joint vision of building a business venture that creates social impact. The realization of this vision is all the more pronounced when we hear stories of how Open has helped various small businesses across the country. Our goal is to ultimately ease business banking for every small business in the country.
