Fintech company 1Pay aims to digitize logistics, transport
The introduction of FASTags gave a much-needed boost to India’s logistics space, clear to be worth $380 billion by 2025. Radio Frequency Identification, popularly known as RFIDenables vehicle owners to pay tolls directly while the vehicle is in motion.
Although the main objective of FASTags is to make quick toll payments, it is a Mumbai-based fintech firm 1 Pay leverages technology to build multiple use cases for fleet owners ranging from paying for fuel, parking, challan and more.
“We use FASTags as a unique identification for vehicles and completely digitize the entire journey for transporters, especially the mid-sized ones,” said company co-founder Sanjiv Singh Entry no.
Singh further explained that while FAST tags make things easy for toll payments, fleet owners, say with over 100 vehicles, may find it difficult to keep up with maintaining the balance of all tags for seamless transportation. With 1Pay, however, fleet owners can easily manage these payments along with additional payments such as parking or fuel as mentioned above.
In addition to the payment package, 1Pay also offers logistics and transport management services, which include supplier payment systems, invoice collection systems, personalized bill payment, insurance and BBPS-based bill payments.
It is worth highlighting that 1Pay is one of the few companies to have approval in principle from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to become a payment aggregator.
Currently, 1Pay has almost 500,000 commercial vehicles on board, and the company aims to increase this number to over 2 million vehicles in the next two to three years. Singh added that the company works with 50,000 fleet owners and aims to double the number in the near future.
1Pay was founded in 2019, and has so far held its own. However, the company is looking to raise external funds in the next two to three months. Without disclosing exact figures, Singh said it would be in the neighborhood of $15 to $20 million.
He further said that the company had nearly Rs 28 crore in revenue in the last financial year and is looking to reach Rs 38 crore to Rs 39 crore in revenue this financial year.
Singh highlighted that the company has been relatively slow in acquiring customers, contrary to recent trends in the market where startups were hyper-aggressive in onboarding customers. But “we didn’t lose customers either,” he added, reflecting on the company’s performance so far.
1Pay now hopes to expand its presence as well. To achieve this, the company plans to have more salespeople and more contact points throughout the country.
India’s logistics space is set to grow exponentially in the coming years. There are already a bunch of startups in the logistics area who are turning to different sub-segments. The logistics boom is also easing the growth of the fintech areasomething the likes of 1Pay want to make use of.