How we helped 4 customers win with Plural solutions

By /

“Until you understand your customers — deeply and genuinely — you cannot truly serve them.”

– Rasheed Ogunlaru (Author)

Plural by Pine Labs is a full-stack online payments and workflow management platform by Pine Labs. Our offerings include payment solutions like payment gateway, payment links, payment pages, tokenisation, affordability suite, subscriptions, payouts etc. among others. As a brand that’s just a year old, we’ve had to work doubly hard to not just establish ourselves in the industry but also to get customers to trust us to give them the best solutions for their businesses. By partnering with Setu (a fintech start-up providing APIs, acquired by Pine Labs) and Qfix (education ERP and workflow management company, acquired by Pine Labs), Plural by Pine Labs, is today equipped to offer customers payment and workflow solutions across needs.

Setu provides APIs and embedded finance products across:

  • Data (account aggregation, KYC, e-Sign)
  • Payments (Bharat Bill Payment Systems, UPI, Whatsapp payment links)
  • Investments (Fixed Deposits)
  • Lending
  • ONDC

Qfix offers:

  • Education EPR
  • Workflow management solutions
  • Invoicing solutions
  • Offline to Online store solutions

Combining Plural’s offerings with Setu and Qfix solutions, we’re able to offer holistic solutions to businesses across data and customer onboarding, lending, investment, embedded finance, education workflow management, invoicing and more!

With this suite of offering, we’re able to empower customers from tech giant, Samsung to the financial entities like IDFC. Let’s dive into how we helped these customers with Plural solutions.

1. Samsung

About Samsung

Samsung specialises in the production of a wide variety of consumer and industry electronics. While they have a huge presence in the offline universe, recently Samsung has taken charge to manage payments for their e-store where Plural by Pine Labs is the exclusive online payments partner

The problem statement

Customer experience has been an important aspect for Samsung. While innovation is at its core, the focus for online payments has been affordability for customers. Samsung’s requirement was for a payment gateway with an in-built Affordability Suite. The Affordability Suite would allow Samsung to easily run offers, cashbacks, discounts and offer convenience-based payments (ie. low cost/no cost EMIs, Buy Now Pay Later). Consequently, Samsung wanted to reduce cash on delivery payments for its products.

Money reconciliation also plays an important part in payments ecosystem and hence, Samsung had been in look out for solutions that can help them address such issues.

Plural’s solution

Plural has built one of the most compelling products when it comes to offers and the Affordability Suite. Through our program, we were able to offer Instant Cashback on EMI and full swipe transactions leading to 7x revenue increase in online sales from July to Sep 2022 and a 2x net revenue growth rate in similar time period.

The instant cash back program is now being extended on T+1 settlement basis which will yield additional revenue growth by 8–10%.

We are also in talks to provide UPI WhatsApp Deeplinks by SETU to help digitise cash-on-delivery (COD) payments by prepaying COD transactions using WhatsApp Deeplinks.

2. Akbar Travels of India Pvt. Ltd

About Akbar Travels

Akbar travels is a leading online travel company in the business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-customers (B2C) space. They have a wide agent network where Plural by Pine Labs comes in to help digitise their online payments.

The problem statement

Akbar Travels had two main problems:

  1. Akbar Travels has its distributors (agents) across all the states of India for whom they have created agent logins. These agents would collect payments from customers and remit the same to Akbar Travels. Akbar Travels would then generate invoices on a weekly basis and share with the agents on the basis of bookings made. However, most of the time, agents would fail to make the invoice payments despite multiple reminders.
  2. Different states in India have different GST rates, however, Akbar Travels’ existing payment gateway system allowed for only a single GST number as an input in the field. Therefore, all invoices to Akbar Travels had the same GST rate applied for all the states, causing confusion as to which agent paid what amount.

Plural’s solution

  1. Qfix + Plural designed a static payments form for Akbar Travels which includes the fields that Akbar Travels wanted to capture while payment collection from their agents like “Agent ID” & “GST Number”. With this form, Akbar Travel can take advance payments from the agent on the basis of which they can issue a limit for bookings to the agent. With the inclusion of “Agent ID” in the payments form, they are able to track the agent who has made the payment.

2. Qfix + Plural created a hybrid solution with payments forms for each state and GST configured accordingly. Hence, we were able to provide the state-wise billing invoice to Akbar Travels from our end, solving their problem.

For the transaction monitoring on dashboard, we have deployed parent child solution wherein on a single dashboard the merchant can track the payments collected from all the states.

3) IDFC

About IDFC

IDFC is a leading finance company in India providing services ranging from infrastructure financing, infrastructure development, investment banking etc.

The problem statement

IDFC had been trying to streamline their EMI collections which has always been tough and operation-heavy for the bank. The bank was already engaging with customers on WhatsApp for customer support but wanted to enable a 24/7 self-serve experience on WhatsApp.

Plural’s Solution

Using WhatsApp Deeplinks built on UPI, IDFC bank was able to send reminders to customers on the platform most convenient to them — WhatsApp. This led to improved customer experience since customers didn’t have to go elsewhere to make payments. It was convenient, quick and seamless. It also made it easy for IDFC to engage with the customer. The results are as follows:

  • 7X payment conversion as compared to SMS & IVR
  • 20% users organically return to the channel MoM to make payments
  • 60% reduction in the cost of collections

4) IFB Appliances

About IFB

IFB Appliances is a home appliances company that is best known for fully automatic washing machines and other domestic appliances across a range of product categories.

The problem statement

IFB approached us with 3 main problem statements:

  1. They faced issues providing the same bank offers to their online customer as their offline customers
  2. Deferred subvention and cashback model were running due to which customers ended up paying more in EMI transactions
  3. Lack of additional bank offers for online customer

Plural’s solution

First, we helped IFB extend their offline bank offers to their online business. We also helped get additionally bank offers for their online business.

Next, we enabled instant subvention and instant cashback to mitigate the high amounts customers were paying with EMI transactions.

Thirdly, we added a corporate Merchant ID (MID) for exclusive corporate offers. Lastly, we helped IFB with success rate improvements for their online payments.

This led to a 10x growth in volume and transactions of IFB.

Wrapping up

Samsung, Akbar Travels, IDFC and IFB are testament to Plural’s solutions empowering a variety of businesses. Combining solutions across Plural, Setu and Qfix has enabled us to be a powerhouse for online payments and workflows.

Want to get started with Plural? Write to us at pgsupport@pinelabs.com.

Read our other case studies here:

Plural by Pine Labs has received an in-principle authorisation from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to operate as a Payment Aggregator.

Related Posts

Scroll to Top