India a key hub for rolling out products globally: Fiserv Global president

'We've done plenty of work around the largest e-tailer in world and partnered with oil and gas companies to integrate payments using voice-activated mobile apps in a frictionless and seamless manner'

The Nasdaq-listed Fiserv, a leading player in the payments space, believes the point-of-sale ecosystem will morph into an inventory management tool from just acceptance facilitation. SRINI KRISH, president, Fiserv Global Service, spoke with Raghu Mohan about the company’s India business. Edited excerpts:

Can you give us the extent of your business footprint in India?

Our largest business is in the US, but we have very fast-growing international markets in the Asia Pacific, Europe, West Asia and Africa. In Asia Pacific, India and Australia are the largest markets. We started with a joint venture with ICICI Bank for merchant acquisition — ICICI Merchant Services — and have been here for 13-14 years. We help merchants to process and accept payments, and work with financial institutions for credit card issuance and acceptance, and to process credit products.

This happens to be our largest business. Our ‘VisionPLUS’ powers most financial institutions for credit-card issuance, and we have a double-digit market share. Another large business for us globally is around fintech products that power banks. We haven’t explored this market quite yet because of the acquisition of First Data Corp for $22 billion three years ago.

How is your innovation factory — GCC (Global Capability Centres) — shaping up?

Our GCC is a matured set-up that we’ve had for about 17-18 years now, and has no white space. We run focused innovation programmes where we bring 32-35 experts across different products, regions, technology, and do focused eight- to ten-week innovation sessions. They sometimes start with a blank piece of paper, or with a problem statement from clients. Sometimes we start with an aspiration like “we want to get into a supermarket, or product”.

We provide a sandbox where we can help people take time to build prototypes, analyse problems and be of help with issues around the world. We are very proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish here in India, as a significant portion of the work gets done here and we continue to lead the organisation from an innovation standpoint.

Can you list a few products that you’ve innovated out here and rolled out abroad?

You have Clover around the restaurant space in the US, and an integrated portal for delivery partners like Uber Delivery or Swiggy. It’s an idea that came from here. We continue to innovate in the ATM management space in the US by using analytics around cash-flow — like when people take money out of ATMs, what kind of money, and how much — to be able to optimise and reduce costs. We’ve done plenty of work around the largest e-tailer in the world and partnered with oil and gas companies to integrate payments using voice-activated mobile apps in a frictionless and seamless manner.

India has more spending places compared to those with PoS (point-of-sale) terminals for acceptance. Why has terminalisation not kept up with card issuance?

One of the main reasons was the settlement process — the payment showed up in merchants’ bank accounts two or three days later. We have innovated in this area and there is instant settlement for merchants. Then there is the cost of terminalisation. Merchants sometimes can’t afford sophisticated terminals which do more than accept payments. Our Clover brand is a PoS system that lets you run your business more efficiently than just accepting payments, whether it is tying up back into inventory, being able to do customer relationship management, or run loyalty programmes.

It’s also an open platform — for any sort of innovations around the world so that people can take our APIs and start building new applications that fundamentally change some of these industries. To me, making the terminals affordable, and being able to process these payments in an expeditious way, for them to be able to get their settlement in their accounts a lot more promptly, should help us in the long run.

How far are we from the PoS ecosystem morphing into an inventory management tool — from acceptance facilitation — which feeds into the supply chain of retailers and manufacturers?  

Our engineers here and in California have built the technology and product, and are ready to launch in India. It’s a cool feature where in the US (with Clover) merchants can plan inventory within a day. The roadblocks would be that merchants would have to sometimes manually key in. But we’re making innovations where they won’t have to manually key in — it can be a one-time set-up and we can help it be updated regularly. The technology exists. It’s a matter of making sure that we provide this to the right folks to take advantage of it.

Your view on the current uptick in card spends? 

It’s a global phenomenon. We’re seeing unemployment levels significantly lower around the world. Yes, inflation is higher. But savings are high, too. In the last couple of years, nobody travelled anywhere. Shopping was limited to what you could buy online. Folks are finally able to spend some of their savings. I feel issuance of credit has also gotten better in the last couple of years.