
Launch HN: Cashfree (YC S17) – Automated Payouts and Bank Transfers for India - akashindya
Hey HN!
I am Akash, co-founder of Cashfree(<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cashfree.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cashfree.com</a>).<p>Cashfree is India&#x27;s first payments platform that automates inbound and outbound bank transfers. This replaces the slow, error prone alternative of uploading Excel files for bulk payments or manually reconciling payments received via bank transfers. Using Cashfree, payouts that took more than a day to process, happen instantly and independent of banking hours.<p>We help businesses like fintech platforms and marketplaces to easily setup custom payment flows to receive and disburse money.<p>Cashfree is being used for automated payouts and collections for use cases like -<p>* Supply chain collections by distributors<p>* Crowdfunding campaigns<p>* Marketplace vendor settlements<p>* Instant deposits and withdrawals at bitcoin exchanges<p>* Payroll for on-demand economy workers<p>* Loan disbursal and repayment by lenders<p>* Invoice payments at Modern ERP and Accounting tools<p>* Instant refunds (versus 5-7 days presently)<p>We started Cashfree to help e-commerce customers pay for their COD orders on delivery, through their mobile. While running Cashfree, we faced challenges around settling payouts to our partner merchants. Our partner merchants too shared similar problems and it made us dive deeper. We found no other payments company solving this common problem and decided to build a solution.<p>We support RESTful APIs that can be integrated easily with tech stack of a business (a) to carry out payouts and (b) automatically reconcile inbound bank transfers. Our solutions are built on top of banking infrastructure and are compliant with the regulations.<p>Would love to answer your questions about Cashfree and look forward to discuss anything on payments and bank transfers.
======
subbu
Accepting payments is complex work if you are a marketplace or have some kind
of service that pools money and then disburse it. SimplyGuest rents shared
houses; multiple people pay house rent which needs to be pooled together and
then the aggregated money is disbursed to many vendors including the house
owner. Its like n-to-1-to-n. I built this entire payments process and system
by myself (if someone is interested they can read it here
[https://blog.simplyguest.com/payments/simplyguest-
payments.h...](https://blog.simplyguest.com/payments/simplyguest-
payments.html)). It took me many months, but the end result wasn't very good.
Moreover, its not a core service SimplyGuest provides.

I integrated Cashfree last month for both collection and payouts at
SimplyGuest. Prior to this I had to upload a carefully crafted excel sheet
into a nodal account using a bank website which works only in a particular
computer and then send the same instructions in a slightly different format to
the bank officials who sit in Mumbai; sometimes when I call them they are off
to lunch or having a cup of coffee, and I needed to keep track of which
festivals Mumbai celebrates! Or else, these instructions may not get
processed. Its such a waste of time.

Cashfree fits into my workflow perfectly, allowing me to automate payments.
Their settlement time is good too. That was the primary reason I preferred
Paytm over Razorpay. But Cashfree is a good alternative to Paytm, Instamojo
and Razorpay.

Thanks Reeju and Akash. You guys are good. I wish you all the best.

~~~
reejudatta
Thanks Subbu, always a pleasure to receive customer feedback. We try to be the
fastest, easiest way to move money in India.

------
sandGorgon
Hi, This is pretty cool. Incoming cash into bank accounts is super hard to
manage and we are looking for some help here.

Do you handle situations where "posting" of a transaction happens later than
the date it is actually meant to. Some banks will then insert it in the middle
(they don't treat it as an append only log) and that breaks the whole
reconciliation. Things like transactional balance(for each line item) starts
screwing up.

We were talking to RBL about it, but if you handle this, we are happy to talk
to you guys.

Also wanted to reiterate that this a cash deposit issue. If it is electronic
already, there's no big issues... But a lot of India is still cash.

~~~
akashindya
We display incoming transactions at our dashboard in the order of their
receipt. Not sure what logic banks use to insert new transaction in the middle
of statement log. It doesn't happen with our AutoCollect(NEFT re-conciliation)
product.

We will set up a demo account for you and let you try it for multiple
transactions. Do share your email or drop a note to us at care@gocashfree.com.
Thanks!

~~~
sandGorgon
My email is in my profile (or in Bookface). This is actually the single
biggest issue in cash reconciliation.

If this is something your banking partner and you can solve, we would love to
hear more.

FYI - all ecommerce companies in India have this issue. Usually they have to
jump a lot of hoops with banks to make it work.

~~~
akashindya
Sure. We'd get in touch with you soon.

------
sitepodmatt
"Sorry, we don't recognize this email id."

This doesn't sound good. Should you not be doing 'If we recognize this email
we will send you a verification code' with a timing randomization / delay if
you're doing anything on the request pipeline such as the SMTP send.

~~~
highace
No, this is fine. If anyone malicious wanted to find out if an email address
is registered they could simply try to create a new account using it.

~~~
sitepodmatt
No, I don't think it is fine. But I do take your point that most signup flows
would have this information leak too, and probably with less effect - i.e.
target wouldn't get a password reset email. The information leak as a whole
though does probably mandates better patterns. I can see it being used by gray
hat competitors - 'Hey before you offer X pricing check if he's already a
customer of Y and so on'.

Weekend project: Scrap HN for emails, run them through redtube which also has
this information leak (someone told me), publish them, charge $5 per deletion.
(Not serious, but hey feasible right)

------
palerdot
Hi. Interesting product. Couple of stuffs when looking around your site.

First, there is a typo for the word 'experience' in this page -
[https://www.cashfree.com/en/careers-pe](https://www.cashfree.com/en/careers-
pe).

Secondly, you have not mentioned any tech stack in your job listings. It is
interesting, but just curious if there is any reason behind that, as tech
stacks are important deciding factors in choosing a job.

Third, the docs page looks pretty empty on the right hand side where it links
to the language specific
documentation([http://docs.gocashfree.com/docs/v1/?java#get-
link](http://docs.gocashfree.com/docs/v1/?java#get-link)). I'm not sure if it
is a feature or a bug.

~~~
akashindya
[1] Yes, it was a mistake. Has been corrected.

[2] We have many modules running inside our ecosystem in different languages.
Front-end is primarily bootstrap and templating is done in PHP. Tech stacks
are important for folks who primarily want to work with given technology,
however, our culture promotes using the best one for a given job and thus we
don't want to restrict ourselves to a specific tech stack.

[3] We are working on adding sample codes for all the mentioned languages.

------
arjun27
Congrats on the launch! I see payment gateway as the first product on the top
nav - perhaps a noob question, but how is this different from Razorpay?

~~~
akashindya
Hi, Cashfree PG can be used for more than accepting card/nb transactions. It
can be plugged with SmartPayout and Marketplace Settlements to disburse
incoming money among vendors/sellers. It's one of the products at our platform
that is essential to automate payment flows at businesses.

------
fgpwd
I have been working on a saas platform and looking for a payment gateway that
can accept payments from outside India towards my Indian Bank account. Does
cashfree work for that purpose? Do you support recurring payments for
international customers?

~~~
akashindya
We can help you accept international card payments. We don't have subscription
product ready yet. Do write us at: care@gocashfree.com

------
siva7891
Congrats on launching FinTech product for the Indian market.

Do you support subscription model i.e., auto charging a credit card every
month for a SAAS product? From what I understood, RBI banned auto charging
customers credit card. I am not sure.

~~~
akashindya
We can enable subscription on credit cards. That product will get ready in a
month from now. Share your contact details, our team will reach out to you
once ready.

~~~
siva7891
That's really great. Core Product is still in alpha phase. Will reach to you
guys once we started to integrate billing.

------
adanak
Hey Akash,

(a) Is there a limit on the quantum of the financial transaction? Example, can
an online funding platform (ticket size is $5,000 to $50,000) use Cashfree to
move money from angels to startups?

(b) Can solution handle overseas payments? To or from India.

Cheers,

~~~
akashindya
Hi there, (a) We support payouts till INR 10,000,000. (b) We don't handle
overseas transfers currently. Payouts can be sent to any bank account in
India. If you are a overseas business and have a entity registered in India,
then we can onboard you at our platform for payout services.

Reach out to us at care@gocashfree.com or leave your email, we will get in
touch.

------
ktta
Your terms and conditions page is broken.

[https://www.cashfree.com/en/terms](https://www.cashfree.com/en/terms)

~~~
nafeydev
Please try this link:
[https://www.cashfree.com/en/terms.html](https://www.cashfree.com/en/terms.html)

------
salilpa
I send multiple payouts by file uploads on my bank regularly, but this doesn't
work on weekends. Can you help here?

~~~
akashindya
Hi, Many banks support bulk transfers only over NEFT and thus it's limiting
them to process your payouts on weekends.

We send out most of our payouts over IMPS and can be used 24x7. IMPS has
couple of restrictions though (a) We don't have as many banks as we have on
NEFT network [List is here: [https://www.npci.org.in/links-imps-
members](https://www.npci.org.in/links-imps-members)] (b) single transaction
can't be more than Rs. 200,000 (however, you can totally send multiple IMPS
transfers to the same account).

Checkout the banks at IMPS network. Do get in touch with us at
care@gocashfree.com, if majority of your beneficiary accounts belong to those
banks. Last we checked, most of the major banks (ICIC, HDFC, AXIS, SBI, YES,
Kotak, RBL, BOI etc) are present.

~~~
sandGorgon
why IMPS and not UPI ? just curious since UPI looks to be the replacement for
IMPS all over.

~~~
vinsat
UPI has a limit of 10k per transaction and 20k per day.

~~~
aryamaan
I don't think this is correct. I just made a transaction of more amount than
you mentioned.

------
8sigma
Hi,Akash good luck with your venture.Can you post a thread on reddit
india(r/india) too?

~~~
akashindya
Sure. Will do it shortly.

------
tatsean
I just checked the API documentation. It seems that all the requests are
through HTTP POST, including Get Status and Get Link, wonder how can that be
considered as RESTful?

~~~
tehlike
Not "pure restful", but if it gets the job done, what's the problem?

Alternatively, if they need a body for their "GET" requests, that might be why
it's a POST?

------
noddy1
Hi - can cashfree be used to make bitcoin -> PayTM payments?

~~~
akashindya
Sorry, we don't support this use case currently. Also, if you could elaborate
on your use case a bit more, then we would be able to respond better.

------
chrischen
Does this work for foreign companies paying out in India?

~~~
akashindya
Foreign company needs to setup an India entity to avail that service. We don't
support cross-border transfers currently.

