The size of the small and medium businesses credit gap is often touted to be worth $350 billion by various studies. This has spawned multiple fintechs targeting treasury operations and transaction banking payments to digitize the business-to-business (b2b) corporate settlements, which could help lenders address this gap better through transparency, transaction and payment data, and invoice information.

Among such startups is Bengaluru-based fintech Converj, looking at converting such payments to card networks through virtual credit cards, which is currently happening through bank payment settlement systems managed by the Reserve Bank of India — NEFT and RTGS. Both these payments do not earn any commissions for the banks and hence card payments present a compelling case for this shift.

Also read | Debit card payments plummet over 13% in FY 2022-23: RBI data

While this is the first such effort, the promise of incentives along with the credit opportunity could help in the adoption of this method. The b2b payment transaction value itself is worth $8 trillion every year in India. Out of the $350 billion credit opportunity, the immediate real addressable market could be around $80-90 billion, say fintech executives.

Converj

Founded in July 2020, Converj has raised US$ 2.8 million so far from Beenxt and other angel investors. While Parry Ravindranathan and Varghese K Abraham started the company, Manish Daswani joined the firm as chief business officer early this month. The company has signed up both issuer and acquirer banks and will see the first set of customers coming onboard this month through the issuer banks.

Abraham has spent more than two decades at Visa and Daswani has been in transaction banking for close to two decades across Visa, Bank of America, and HSBC Bank. Ravindranathan previously served as the managing director of Bloomberg Media’s international business.

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