Launch HN: Cashfree (YC S17) – Automated Payouts and Bank Transfers for India
Cashfree is India's first payments platform that automates inbound and outbound bank transfers. This replaces the slow, error prone alternative of uploading Excel files for bulk payments or manually reconciling payments received via bank transfers. Using Cashfree, payouts that took more than a day to process, happen instantly and independent of banking hours.
We help businesses like fintech platforms and marketplaces to easily setup custom payment flows to receive and disburse money.
Cashfree is being used for automated payouts and collections for use cases like -
* Supply chain collections by distributors
* Crowdfunding campaigns
* Marketplace vendor settlements
* Instant deposits and withdrawals at bitcoin exchanges
* Payroll for on-demand economy workers
* Loan disbursal and repayment by lenders
* Invoice payments at Modern ERP and Accounting tools
* Instant refunds (versus 5-7 days presently)
We started Cashfree to help e-commerce customers pay for their COD orders on delivery, through their mobile. While running Cashfree, we faced challenges around settling payouts to our partner merchants. Our partner merchants too shared similar problems and it made us dive deeper. We found no other payments company solving this common problem and decided to build a solution.
We support RESTful APIs that can be integrated easily with tech stack of a business (a) to carry out payouts and (b) automatically reconcile inbound bank transfers. Our solutions are built on top of banking infrastructure and are compliant with the regulations.
Would love to answer your questions about Cashfree and look forward to discuss anything on payments and bank transfers.
43 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 88.4 ms ] threadDocumentation of Bank transfer products (Payout and NEFT re-conciliation) is not public yet. We send it to our merchants during their on-boarding. We understand that it makes evaluation by new/prospective customers at bit harder and thus, are in-process of revamping our doc site to include documentation of all the products we support.
Do drop us a note at care@gocashfree.com. We will share it with you.
Alternatively, if they need a body for their "GET" requests, that might be why it's a POST?
[1] http://roy.gbiv.com/untangled/2008/rest-apis-must-be-hyperte...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HATEOAS
Cashfree looks promising and something really needed in India especially the bank transfer API. Good luck to the team.
Do you handle situations where "posting" of a transaction happens later than the date it is actually meant to. Some banks will then insert it in the middle (they don't treat it as an append only log) and that breaks the whole reconciliation. Things like transactional balance(for each line item) starts screwing up.
We were talking to RBL about it, but if you handle this, we are happy to talk to you guys.
Also wanted to reiterate that this a cash deposit issue. If it is electronic already, there's no big issues... But a lot of India is still cash.
We will set up a demo account for you and let you try it for multiple transactions. Do share your email or drop a note to us at care@gocashfree.com. Thanks!
If this is something your banking partner and you can solve, we would love to hear more.
FYI - all ecommerce companies in India have this issue. Usually they have to jump a lot of hoops with banks to make it work.
Monday to Saturday (Except 2nd and 4th Saturday) is 8:00 AM to 6:30 PM. [0]
I'm not sure if Cashfree is using NEFT or IMPS. If it is IMPS, it should be much faster.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Electronic_Funds_Tran...
We send out most of our payouts over IMPS and can be used 24x7. IMPS has couple of restrictions though (a) We don't have as many banks as we have on NEFT network [List is here: https://www.npci.org.in/links-imps-members] (b) single transaction can't be more than Rs. 200,000 (however, you can totally send multiple IMPS transfers to the same account).
Checkout the banks at IMPS network. Do get in touch with us at care@gocashfree.com, if majority of your beneficiary accounts belong to those banks. Last we checked, most of the major banks (ICIC, HDFC, AXIS, SBI, YES, Kotak, RBL, BOI etc) are present.
I integrated Cashfree last month for both collection and payouts at SimplyGuest. Prior to this I had to upload a carefully crafted excel sheet into a nodal account using a bank website which works only in a particular computer and then send the same instructions in a slightly different format to the bank officials who sit in Mumbai; sometimes when I call them they are off to lunch or having a cup of coffee, and I needed to keep track of which festivals Mumbai celebrates! Or else, these instructions may not get processed. Its such a waste of time.
Cashfree fits into my workflow perfectly, allowing me to automate payments. Their settlement time is good too. That was the primary reason I preferred Paytm over Razorpay. But Cashfree is a good alternative to Paytm, Instamojo and Razorpay.
Thanks Reeju and Akash. You guys are good. I wish you all the best.
This doesn't sound good. Should you not be doing 'If we recognize this email we will send you a verification code' with a timing randomization / delay if you're doing anything on the request pipeline such as the SMTP send.
In the latter, they will wait for the code for a minute or two and then realise they entered an in-correct email id.
Weekend project: Scrap HN for emails, run them through redtube which also has this information leak (someone told me), publish them, charge $5 per deletion. (Not serious, but hey feasible right)
(a) Is there a limit on the quantum of the financial transaction? Example, can an online funding platform (ticket size is $5,000 to $50,000) use Cashfree to move money from angels to startups?
(b) Can solution handle overseas payments? To or from India.
Cheers,
Reach out to us at care@gocashfree.com or leave your email, we will get in touch.
https://www.cashfree.com/en/terms
First, there is a typo for the word 'experience' in this page - https://www.cashfree.com/en/careers-pe.
Secondly, you have not mentioned any tech stack in your job listings. It is interesting, but just curious if there is any reason behind that, as tech stacks are important deciding factors in choosing a job.
Third, the docs page looks pretty empty on the right hand side where it links to the language specific documentation(http://docs.gocashfree.com/docs/v1/?java#get-link). I'm not sure if it is a feature or a bug.
[2] We have many modules running inside our ecosystem in different languages. Front-end is primarily bootstrap and templating is done in PHP. Tech stacks are important for folks who primarily want to work with given technology, however, our culture promotes using the best one for a given job and thus we don't want to restrict ourselves to a specific tech stack.
[3] We are working on adding sample codes for all the mentioned languages.
Do you support subscription model i.e., auto charging a credit card every month for a SAAS product? From what I understood, RBI banned auto charging customers credit card. I am not sure.