The numbers Brief Episode map Takeaways Charts Quotes Clips Glossary Go next Transcript

Episode 47 · Fintech · 38 min

The common rail Indian B2B never built

Between a buyer's SAP and a seller's Tally, the invoice still travels by PDF and phone call. Banker-turned-serial-founder Ritesh Agarwal on the interoperability rail nobody built, the 25–30% reconciliation tax it would erase, and why his next obituary is for SWIFT.

Payments & fintech SaaS & enterprise Credit & lending

Ritesh Agarwal

Founder, invoice · with Vishal Krishna

37:59

Said in this episode

▶ 1:40

₹20 cr

Automation threshold in Indian B2B

Ritesh's rule of thumb: any business above roughly ₹20 crore annual throughput in India already runs some sort of ERP automation.

▶ 7:40

25–30%

Accounts time lost to reconciliation

Share of a seller-side accounts team's hours spent only exchanging outstanding and payment data with buyers, per the statistics Ritesh cites.

▶ 6:40

6–10

Invoices outstanding at any moment

Typical open invoices in a distributor-to-retailer relationship, on credit periods of 7–40 days with up to two new invoices a week.

▶ 9:58

<10 min

Go-live time on the Tally plugin

Invoice's standard Tally ERP plugin takes a seller live in under ten minutes; the buyer installs nothing at all.

▶ 22:48

8 sec

Claimed cross-border settlement time

With an invoice-style rail on both sides, an India–UK invoice can settle in eight seconds or less versus an expensive SWIFT round trip, as claimed in conversation.

▶ 28:48

18 Nov 2014

The day he pitched 'UPI' to RBI

Ritesh presented his private version of what became UPI to RBI's DPSS office in Mumbai, accompanied by senior people from a private bank and NPCI.

The brief

The argument in sixty seconds

Any Indian business above roughly ₹20 crore in annual throughput already runs an ERP — and the automation dies the moment a purchase order or invoice crosses to the counterparty, even when both sides run SAP. Ritesh Agarwal's claim is blunt: nowhere on planet Earth is there an industry-standard rail for two ERPs to exchange data, and the cost is measurable — seller accounts teams burn 25–30% of their hours reconciling outstanding payments, TReDS stalls waiting for manual buyer confirmations, and the same invoice gets discounted at two lenders. His fix, invoice, is a bi-directional plugin that goes live in under ten minutes and asks the buyer to install nothing. Around it sits a personal arc: a Nairobi-shaped read on wallets, a version of UPI pitched to RBI on 18 November 2014, a startup shut down — and a fresh obituary, this time for SWIFT.

Worth your time if you are

B2B founders fixing distribution and integration gaps

SME owners and CFOs fighting working-capital cycles

Fintech and supply-chain-finance operators

Bankers weighing fintech partnerships

Episode map

Where the conversation travels

Every block is a chapter, coloured by what it's about. Click any of it to jump straight to that minute on YouTube.

Payments & fintechSaaS & enterpriseCredit & lendingFounder journeyData & digitisationRegulation & policy

01Cold open: automation ends at the seam 0:00 Vishal frames invoice as a common rail for collections, discounting and lending; Ritesh's setup — any business above ₹20 crore throughput is automated, until the document crosses the company boundary. 02Two SAPs still can't exchange an invoice 2:37 Even a Toyota and its vendor on the same SAP can't exchange data — version opacity, trust and vendor liability — so invoice claims the world's first interoperable, bi-directional ERP exchange. 03The 25–30% reconciliation tax 5:36 Distributor-to-retailer credit runs 7–40 days with six to ten invoices open at a time, and seller accounts teams spend 25–30% of their hours just exchanging outstanding and UTR data. 04TReDS islands and missing confirmations 8:00 Big conglomerates are bombarded with manual 'will you pay this?' requests, and TReDS cannot discount a bill without the buyer's confirmation — data exchange still works on islands. 05Ten-minute go-live, no app for the buyer 9:48 A standard Tally plugin takes the seller live in under ten minutes; the buyer installs nothing and confirms over an OTP-secured browser link — the portal comes to them. 06Making the 90-day GST rule enforceable 11:17 A neutral rail could let GSTN and the corporate-affairs ministry actually enforce the 90-day invoice-reversal and 45-day MSME payment rules, while invoice sits beneath the government's SME stack as the 'underlying underdog'. 07Anchor finance and the double discount 13:54 Anchor finance leaves non-anchor MSMEs out, lenders like KredX need confirmation tech without costly ERP integration, and hooks inside both ERPs let invoice block the same bill from being discounted twice. 08Old wine in new bottle: fintech grows up 17:06 India leads global payment tech; the 2010s fintechs resold what banks already offered, while the new wave builds infrastructure layers banks adopt — and UPI's export makes going abroad easy. 09Eight seconds versus SWIFT 21:32 A cross-border invoice settles through SWIFT slowly and expensively; with invoice-style rails on both ends Ritesh claims eight-second settlement, compressing only the 'courier-boy charge' while banks keep forex and advisory income. 10Nairobi, NUUP and calling wallets' death 24:40 Laid off in 2013 and shaped by a Nairobi stint, he backed the *99# NUUP rail as the safest payment technology, watched float-hungry telecom operators kill it, and predicted in 2015 that wallets would die. 1118 Nov 2014: the RBI meeting gone south 28:52 He pitched his version of UPI to RBI's DPSS office with NPCI and a private bank in the room, the meeting went bad, and shutting the startup felt 'like somebody snatching your baby away'. 12'Invoice me' as a verb — and an obituary 32:26 The name is built to become a verb, his next bold call is that SWIFT died 15 years ago, and his advice to the young: marry one idea in your first 3–5 years, in health, education, food or finance.

Takeaways

Ideas to carry out of this hour

Indian B2B is automated inside, manual at every seam

Anyone above roughly ₹20 crore in annual throughput already runs an ERP, but a purchase order leaves one system digital and lands at the counterparty manual — even when both entities run SAP, version opacity, mutual distrust and the vendor's refusal to own cross-boundary data liability keep them apart. His claim is global: on planet Earth there is no industry-standard technology for two ERPs to exchange data, only pair-wise couplings between mega-partners like a Maruti and a Tata. That gap is the company — a claimed world-first interoperable, bi-directional exchange layer.

▶ 1:40 ▶ 3:47 ▶ 4:25

Reconciliation eats 25–30% of seller accounts time

In distributor-to-retailer trade, credit periods run 7 to 40 days, with two new invoices a week and six to ten outstanding at any moment. Roughly one in two people in a seller's accounts office exists just to remind buyers what they owe, and matching each UTR back to open invoices adds another 10–15 minutes per payment. His all-in estimate: 25–30% of seller-side accounts time goes purely to exchanging outstanding and payment data — coordination cost, not collection.

▶ 6:31 ▶ 7:06 ▶ 7:40

Bring the portal to the buyer, not the buyer to the portal

The seller installs a standard Tally plugin and goes live in under ten minutes; the buyer is asked to install nothing — no app, no plugin — because Ritesh believes the future belongs to the browser, not mobile applications. The buyer simply gets an OTP-secured link: 'we bring the portal to them rather than bring the customer to the portal.' The design accepts that the party without the working-capital pain will never onboard, so it removes onboarding entirely.

▶ 9:58 ▶ 10:22 ▶ 10:42

Shared state, not diligence, fixes bill discounting

TReDS exists, but a bill cannot be discounted until the buyer confirms it — and conglomerates bombarded with manual 'is this ₹20 lakh invoice okay?' requests eventually say it is not their job. Worse, a seller holding one Tata Motors acceptance can discount the same invoice with lender one and then lender two — 'that's cheating', intentional or not, and no lender can see it. Invoice's hooks inside both ERPs mark a bill as discounted at the seller level and block the second attempt, giving the whole lending industry one common check: if it is logged, don't discount.

▶ 8:17 ▶ 15:56 ▶ 16:31

Banks chase float; invoice charges per transaction

Banks earn on float, foreign exchange, advisory and correspondent banking; invoice earns per transaction, so it is not competing on the bank's revenue line. He calls the 2010s fintech wave 'old wine in new bottle' — reselling what banks already offered while declaring banks disrupted — whereas the durable play is infrastructure banks themselves adopt. A private-sector bank he is engaged with wants invoice bundled with current accounts to differentiate its SME offering, and the press shift from 'banks versus fintech' to 'banks and fintech' tracks the same change.

▶ 18:52 ▶ 19:28 ▶ 23:32

His version of UPI died in an RBI meeting on 18 Nov 2014

On 18 November 2014 he walked into RBI's DPSS office in Mumbai — flanked by a senior private-sector banker and an NPCI representative — to present his version of what later shipped as UPI, built to kill the fraud-prone pull mechanism he had studied in Nairobi. The interaction 'was not conducted the way we should have' and things went very bad; his co-founders later counselled a joint decision to shut the company down. The mistake he names: assuming the technology was still 'ours' when it had become national-scale, with capital needs to match.

▶ 28:48 ▶ 30:22 ▶ 31:51

Wallets then, SWIFT now: how he calls rail obituaries

In 2015, at peak wallet hype, he predicted wallets would die because they cannot survive anywhere the cost of banking transactions is near zero — as in India — and was criticised for it until it came true. His new bold statement is that SWIFT as a technology died 15 years back and nobody noticed. The mechanism is already in the episode: an invoice-style rail on both sides settles a cross-border bill in eight seconds, leaving banks their forex and advisory income while the 'courier-boy charge' disappears.

▶ 28:00 ▶ 22:40 ▶ 35:30

The numbers, drawn

What the episode measures

Every figure below was said on air — timestamps included, caveats kept.

Conversation share

portion of the hour spent on each theme

Payments & fintech30%

SaaS & enterprise22%

Credit & lending16%

Founder journey14%

Data & digitisation8%

Regulation & policy6%

Computed from the chapter map of this episode.

Distributor-to-retailer credit period, as quoted

days

Ritesh's quoted range for D2R credit periods — 'anything between seven days to 30 days or 40 days', with 6–10 invoices outstanding at a time; a stated range, not a measured distribution.▶ 6:35

Worth keeping

Lines that stay

On planet Earth, there is no technology that, as an industry standard, two ERPs can exchange data with each other. That doesn't exist.

— Ritesh Agarwal ▶ 4:25

We bring the portal to them, rather than bring the customer to the portal.

— Ritesh Agarwal ▶ 10:42

It feels as if somebody is snatching your baby away from you — a baby whom you have been holding next to your chest.

— Ritesh Agarwal ▶ 30:35

A bold statement: SWIFT as a technology — it died 15 years back, but nobody noticed.

— Ritesh Agarwal ▶ 35:30

Clips that travel

Short on time? Start here

B2B founders fixing distribution and integration gaps

No common rail on planet Earth

The thesis stated whole: even two SAP shops can't exchange data, no industry-standard rail exists anywhere, and pair-wise links don't count.

2:45 → 6:00 · 3 min ▶ Watch clip

SME owners and CFOs fighting working-capital cycles

The 25–30% reconciliation tax, itemised

Numbers on the pain: 7–40-day credit cycles, 6–10 open invoices, UTR matching, and the TReDS confirmation step throttling discounting.

6:10 → 9:48 · 4 min ▶ Watch clip

Fintech and supply-chain-finance operators

Blocking the double discount

Anchor finance's blind spot, the KredX conversations, and the ERP hook that stops one invoice being discounted at two lenders.

13:36 → 17:06 · 4 min ▶ Watch clip

Cross-border payments builders

Eight seconds versus SWIFT

The eight-second settlement claim, what banks really earn on — float, forex, advisory — and the 'courier-boy charge' that collapses.

21:23 → 24:40 · 3 min ▶ Watch clip

First-time founders facing a shutdown

The shutdown: 18 Nov 2014 at the RBI

The RBI meeting that went south, what closing a startup feels like, and the capital-scale lesson he refuses to repeat at invoice.

28:25 → 32:26 · 4 min ▶ Watch clip

Glossary

The jargon, unpacked

ERP

Enterprise Resource Planning — the software (SAP, Oracle, Tally) that runs a company's procurement, billing and accounts internally; the systems invoice connects.

UTR

Unique Transaction Reference — the ID a bank stamps on every electronic payment in India; sellers match UTRs to open invoices by hand today.

TReDS

Trade Receivables Discounting System — RBI-licensed platforms where MSMEs auction buyer-confirmed invoices to lenders for early payment; stuck on manual buyer confirmation.

Bill discounting

Selling an unpaid invoice to a lender for immediate cash at a discount; the lender collects from the buyer at maturity. 'Anchor finance' is the version arranged around one large buyer's vendors.

NUUP

National Unified USSD Platform — the *99# mobile-banking rail launched in 2013 that talks directly to the telecom network and works on feature phones; starved by float-seeking operators.

Float

Money a wallet or bank holds between pay-in and pay-out, earning a return meanwhile — the revenue model Ritesh says doomed wallets in low-transaction-cost India.

Connections

If this resonated, go here next

EP 18 · Fintech

Full transcript

The whole conversation, searchable

Auto-generated captions, lightly cleaned. Click a timestamp to open that moment on YouTube.