Bringing Rural Fintech To The Fore The aim of the Ippo Pay is to put an end to every tedious and time taking task of a rural Indian merchant handling his/her payments, educate them and help them adapt to modern financial technologies.

Fintech has been a sector that has seen a steep upward trajectory in India. The fintech market in India is growing at an unprecedented rate. According to a report by BCG and FICCI, the Indian fintech industry's valuation is expected to reach $150-160 billion by 2025.

Mohan K, co-founder and CEO, IppoPay, worked as a designer in his early career and soon his journey inspired him to be an entrepreneur leading him to found RoamSoft, a software development company. By 2018, Roamsoft could self-hold its floor with a workforce of over 50 employees. The instincts of a serial entrepreneur and an absolute opportunist, Mohan stepped into the world of FinTech, having co-founded Foloosi Technologies based in the UAE. Foloosi grew to see quick investors and the firm had beenranked in the top 20 fintech startups in the middle-east by Forbes. Following Foloosi, He launched IppoPay as the CEO in November 2020 a payment aggregator for businesses in Chennai, in November 2020.

The company is focused on catering to the financial needs of the millions of under/unbanked sectors in India and helping them speed-up to digital banking. The aim of the company is to put an end to every tedious and time taking task of a rural Indian merchant handling his/her payments, educate them and help them adapt to modern financial technologies.

"I hail from a village, and every time I visit my place I realise that digital banking has not reached every nook and corner of the country. There is still a lot of work to be done and we can clearly see a huge chunk of untapped market, mainly the entire belt of merchants in the lower tier areas which we focus to cater to," said Mohan.

The online services of IppoPay are distributed nationwide whereas the offline services are centred in Tamil Nadu despite being initialised in Karnataka. The company has raised $2.3 million from Ventures, Better Capital, Blume Ventures and angel investors.

The main challenge that the company faced was the apprehension towards digital payments. Awareness and literacy issues played a massive role,because in rural areas any change from routine was seen as a risk. According to Mohan, the company aimed to provide what was lacking in the already existing fintech space and that is how IppoPay has had a breakthrough and has managed to win high on customer satisfaction.

"Read the market, choose the right team, trust your vision and chase your dreams. Hit it hard without worrying about the results," advised Mohan to the next-gen entrepreneurs.

The immediate target for the company is to tap 75% of Tamil Nadu's unbanked and underbanked merchants and eradicate the time consuming manual banking and the paper-pen processes in business. The company intends to spread awareness and bring the tech-challenged Indian Merchants into the digital world of payments. IppoPay is also the new hotbed for investors, having raised $2.3M in seed-rounds, they are looking forward to raise further rounds of series fundings.