Obopay CEO’s 3 Tips for Entrepreneurs Looking to Explore the B2B Fintech Space

Shailendra Naidu thinks fintech is an over abused word today

By Aashika Jain | Jul 31, 2019
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The CEO of Obopay, a fintech startup that provides merchant payment platform, Shailendra Naidu thinks fintech is an over abused word today.

The moment you say fintech, people always think that you have to be there on the street and retailers should accept it and customer should use it. A lot of money expands to build a brand in the space but then when you sieve through all the noise and see enterprise segment adoption that has been really low and not many enterprises have implemented fintech solutions says Naidu.

A simple way to look at it is how much cash transaction has an organization done and you will see there is a lot of money spent in cash and why they are not doing it because the traditional financial firms are not able to provide solutions at an optimum cost to transact the expected level of transactions and hence they fall back on physical cash, he explains.

His 3 simple tips for entrepreneurs looking to tap into the fintech B2B space include:

Look at the sector where you are trying to solve the specific problem. The problems have to exist and have to be real, and the entrepreneur should know the problem is real. The enterprise will have to think that the problem is real. It is a slightly tougher journey; you need to have a lot of patience and smart choices of enterprises, which can be replicated across.

It is also the biggest danger that when you actually go to an enterprise, when you say I am giving you the solution you can get carried. There is a service and it’s not a product. There is a fundamental difference between a product and a service – that focus has to be there.

If you have made anything, it has to replicate across the globe.

The CEO of Obopay, a fintech startup that provides merchant payment platform, Shailendra Naidu thinks fintech is an over abused word today.

The moment you say fintech, people always think that you have to be there on the street and retailers should accept it and customer should use it. A lot of money expands to build a brand in the space but then when you sieve through all the noise and see enterprise segment adoption that has been really low and not many enterprises have implemented fintech solutions says Naidu.

A simple way to look at it is how much cash transaction has an organization done and you will see there is a lot of money spent in cash and why they are not doing it because the traditional financial firms are not able to provide solutions at an optimum cost to transact the expected level of transactions and hence they fall back on physical cash, he explains.

Aashika Jain

Former Associate Editor, Entrepreneur India
Entrepreneur Staff
Journalist in the making since 2006! My fastest fingers have worked for India's business news channel CNBC-TV18, global news wire Thomson Reuters, the digital arm of India's biggest newspaper The Economic Times and Entrepreneur India as the Digital Head.

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