2013Laid off, with a lesson from Nairobi in his pocket. A senior job at a UK startup ended when the company hit trouble. Two or three years working the Nairobi market had already convinced him that merchant payments run on a pull mechanism, where the customer hands over the credentials and most of the fraud happens. The same year *99#, or NUUP, launched, which he still calls the safest payment technology there is because it talks straight to the telecom operator and no mobile operating system can get into the session.
2014+India starts laying rails. UPI, GST and then the India stack, with logistics, agri and health stacks behind them. Ritesh's read on the fintechs of that decade is unkind: they resold what banks already offered and announced that banks had been disrupted. The durable play, he argues, is infrastructure the banks adopt themselves.
Nov 2014His version of UPI dies in a room at the Reserve Bank. On 18 November 2014 he presented the concept to the RBI's DPSS leadership in Mumbai, flanked by a very senior banker from a private-sector bank and a representative from NPCI. The interaction was not conducted the way it should have been, things went badly, and the company did not recover. Closing it, he says, felt like somebody snatching your baby away.
2015He buries wallets while wallets are winning. His argument was that a wallet cannot survive anywhere the cost of a banking transaction is close to zero, which is India. People did not like the statement and he was criticised for it.
2015-16Invoyz is conceived, and fails a due diligence. He took the concept to the number one company in its Indian industry, whose nearest competitor was a tenth its size. They liked it. His balance sheet did not clear their checks.
TodayThe rail ships, and SWIFT gets its obituary. A standard Tally plugin takes a seller live in under ten minutes and the buyer installs nothing, confirming over an OTP-secured browser link; hooks inside both ERPs mark a bill as discounted so a second lender cannot discount it again. He is aiming at the 25 to 30 per cent of a seller's accounts hours that go to chasing outstanding payments, and at TReDS bills that sit undiscounted waiting for a manual confirmation. His next bold call: SWIFT as a technology died fifteen years ago and nobody noticed. With rails on both ends, an India to UK invoice settles in eight seconds.
