Raj N founded ZikZuk in 2020 with an aim to provide easy and timely credit to SMEs. It also marked Zaggle’s entry into the neo-banking business.
“For the past ten years, we have been cooperating with the SME segment as ZikZuk was incubated by Zaggle, a fintech company that is into digitising spends. The company has worked with 10,000 merchants and 4,500 corporates. As the pandemic destroys markets and businesses and especially hits smaller businesses due to cash flow challenges, ZikZuk aims to solve this urgent financial challenge through our business finance manager, a platform to address cash flow and credit challenges for SMEs,” said Raj N, founder and chairman, ZikZuk.
Flagship products
ZikZuk has three primary products:
- Founders Card: The company claims it as South Asia’s first business infinite credit card curated for the needs of the SME owners and founders. It is a business credit card for business owners that provides world-class credit, rewards and benefits, and AI-generated reports, so people can always keep track of their expenses. The advantages include easy access to credit, real-time transaction data and AI-generated business reports.
- Business Finance Manager: It’s a financial operating system that manages the entire business finance for SMEs, including AR/AP management, cash flow management, working capital management, Inventory management etc and suggests the best possible options available to foster growth. It will send automatic reminders to customers about payment dates. It will help them recover at least 15% of their funds faster and provide them with an analysis of the debtor’s payment behaviour.
- Multibank Account Aggregation: Aggregate current and savings accounts of SMEs on one platform, including check account balance, make funds transfers (NEFT, IMPS, RTGS), view and download account statements, view recent transactions, view categorisation or segmentation of transactions.
Tech behind
The company uses various image recognition algorithms like CNN, decision tree, k-nearest neighbour to verify user’s address, id, and financial proof. Additionally, image hashing, image compression techniques like ORB, etc., are used to detect if the user is uploading duplicate images.
ZikZuk leverages different techniques and fuzzy-wuzzy algorithms to detect and extract text from images to perform certain validations. Moreover, the company predicts a customer’s cash flow using time series algorithms like Arima, Sarima, Holt-Winters techniques.
“We want to come up with a credit score to see if a customer can be provided with a business loan and come up with risk profiles of the customer – a lot of feature engineering used here to analyse the relevant features so that we can come up with a better credit risk models and we also use algorithms like monotone optimal binning,” said Raj.
Tech stack
- Ruby on rails in the business layer, which provides business functionalities through APIs, Mongo.
- Postgres and Redis as datastore
- ReactJS as our presentation layer
- Kafka for inter-process communication
- CORS, queues, streaming etc. sidekiq for our async jobs
- Python/Flask for our AI/ML processes
Business
“Covid has had a positive impact on the business as this is the time when SMEs need the entire view of their business, especially cash flow movement. Our platform, BFM, perfectly solves this problem, so SMEs would want a platform like this,” said Raj.
The company has started initiatives in the middle of the pandemic.
- Declaring a Covid bonus for employees to help them buy essentials. Provided laptops to everyone and asked to work from home as soon as the lockdown started.
- Launched completely DIY digital products and virtual prepaid cards for online purchases.
- Started providing 24/7 support to clients and attended to their queries in turns.
ZikZuk considers Open, Niyo and Instant Pay as competitors. “Although these neobanks offer certain out-of-the-box features, what makes ZikZuk stand out is the Business Finance Manager application that enables entrepreneurs to seamlessly manage their cash while helping them to make data-driven decisions for their businesses,” said Raj.
On the hiring phase, Raj N said: “We have seen a massive talent interest in the vision and product that we are building. People have been approaching us to be a part of the team. We look for attitude, excitement and eagerness to learn new things, execution capability while hiring. Skills can be taught, but not attitude, so that’s the most important thing while building a startup.”
Road ahead
Over the next year, the company plans to introduce cash flow analysis, scenario analysis, reconciliation etc.
“We have been able to scale up our business by buttressing the SME sector during these hard times. Having a scientific and systematic approach has helped us to scale up our business massively. So far, we have been profitable and are continuing to reap the benefits of starting the business during the time of this pandemic,” said Raj.
“ZikZuk is eyeing to raise $5 million in Series A to further develop products and services for the SME ecosystem. Every day is a challenge in the startup journey, but we have to celebrate small wins that would eventually make us a big success,” he concluded.
