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Published on: July 6, 2022, 3:30 p.m.
Zaggle ushers in a revolutionary change
  • Raj: seeing a sea change

By Lancelot Joseph. Executive Editor, Business India

“The opportunity in India is a $1 trillion addressable spend management market,” forecasts Raj N., founder & chairman, Zaggle, which he founded in Hyderabad in 2011. “Global business spend management software market is expected to exhibit growth at the rate of 11.2 per cent during the forecast period (2019–27)”.

Raj, a serial entrepreneur and an active angel investor, has a vision to become a global digital bank. “We want to take banking to corporates and consumers,” he adds. “Today, the banking processes and workflows are broken, which are mostly manual and partly digital, making banking a difficult process. With our experience and interaction with various business groups, we have realised that businesses face lots of problems in managing their financial requirements and expense management. We have also figured out that payments and accounting in conventional ways are a bit broken, inefficient, and sluggish”.

Some of the pain points, which the businesses come across, are the complex and tedious workflow, payments still made in cash, no real-time control or visibility over the business spends, manual accounting and a reconciling stack of receipts and spreadsheets, besides the risk of frauds and duplication. “All these called for a change -- a revolutionary change”.

Today, Zaggle has 4,500 plus clients. It also has over 4.5 million users, has offices across 10 cities with about 200 plus employees. And, it is geared towards building a network-agnostic payment. In the last 12 months, it has added clients like Mindtree, MyGlamm group, CarDekho24, Taskus, IDC Technologies, AT&T, Pitney Bowes, Compucom, Ensono, Kirloskar Industries, Canara HSBC, NDTV, Discovery group, ITC, Teams Computer, CNH group, Khatabook, GKB Lens, Volkswagen, Manipal group, etc, to name a few from a list of 1,000 plus.

Significant growth

“When we were taking a look around last year, the pandemic was not completely over and some awareness of Covid was still there,” informs Raj. “Our growth trajectory has been stupendous over the last 9-10 years. Despite the pandemic, during the last one year too, on an enlarged base, we have done significant growth,” he adds. Now, he is talking about a 70 per cent plus growth from Rs223 crore in the top line and 100 per cent in bottom line, which is still being audited.

“At Zaggle, we get full support on all our queries that are raised,” says Seema Arora of Edelweiss Tokio Life Insurance. “And the team also ensures that issues get sorted out on time. People who win rewards are happy getting a reward point against the actual rewards they have won”.

“Our employees are satisfied with the Zaggle’s Prepaid Card Solution,” discloses Surbhi Jain, senior manager, CRM, Mitsubishi Electric. “Zaggle Meal Cards are widely accepted and is well-supported by its efficient technical platform, which fetches tax benefits to our employees”.

“Zaggle Employee Benefits is a complete package, where I get all my benefits on the Zinger card,” says Abrar M, senior software engineer, Zee Entertainment. “I can also keep track of all transactions in real-time via the mobile application. It has a network of 500,000 plus merchants accepting its cards, making them convenient to use”.

  • Corporates are willing to undergo a metamorphosis, to be able to utilise something, which they had always missed, which is data

“India is witnessing a sea change, we find, by looking at the Indian dynamics,” explains Raj. “If you look at today’s goings on, you will find that everything you knew earlier in a structured form is now becoming unstructured. So, I would take the theory of Joseph Schumpeter, who said that, innovation is creative destruction. So, what India is going through is nothing but creative destruction of the overall processes, to create a new innovative business landscape in India”. Corporates are willing to adopt to a new process, he adds. “They are willing to undergo metamorphosis, to be able to utilise something, which they had always missed, which is data”. Raj, who is from expense management, now has added overall spend management of companies to his portfolio. 

Recently, Zaggle had mandated Aranca Global, a research firm, to figure out what would be the best locations for it to a geographical expansion. “Aranca has come up with some suggestions, listing MENA region at the top, then Latin America, then Europe, the UK and the US in that order,” sums up Raj. He is now “in the process of raising funds. And, I think, hopefully, in next couple of months, something dramatic should happen. We are just north of $100 million and that is what we are looking to raise. We will look at private equity -- global private equity players. Another alternative is to go for an IPO”.

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