CityCash, a Mumbai-based fintech startup bringing state-of-the-art technologies and disruptive business models in the digital payments space, announced that it has raised $1 million seed funding from Orios Venture Partners, an early-stage venture capital fund.
CityCash will use the current financing for expanding market access, merchant ecosystem, and to develop technology to deploy Open Loop National Common Mobility Cards on SoftPOS and digital ticketing solutions. CityCash had earlier raised funds from Fino Paytech, the promoter of Fino Payments Bank and a fintech company that works towards enabling financial inclusion.
Founded in 2017 by Vineet Toshniwal, CityCash offers a multi-purpose NFC-based smart card that can be used to transact in an offline mode in transit and retail, rendering a smooth tap-and-pay experience for consumers.
Speaking about the startup, Vineet Toshniwal, Founder, CityCash, said, “The current ticketing model is high touch and requires exchange of paper tickets, coins and currencies. The need of the hour for the bus corporations is to provide cashless, contactless, and COVID-safe travel experience to the consumers by adapting technology at a rapid pace. The RBI’s recent announcement of offline payments in retail will be a gamechanger. Transit can play a pivotal role as it can drive very fast consumer acquisition and habit change from cash to tap and pay.”
Partnering with MSRTC, the state bus corporation of Maharashtra, CityCash said it has issued three million cards to consumers in nine months since it went live, and is accepted in 20,000 buses, each a unique point of sale. MSRTC has a daily bus ridership of seven million and an annual bus ticketing turnover of $1 billion. Transit payments necessarily require a phygital model where the consumers have to be serviced through an agent network. FINO and CityCash have together activated a large network of 4,000 agents in Maharashtra.
“India’s micropayments number over one trillion transactions in volume and $500 billion in value take place purely in cash as none of the existing players have built a win-win model for consumers-merchants alike. These small payments cannot be carried out online with dependency on network availability and high charges to merchants. UPI and card POS machines only operate in online mode, which is not suited for micropayments. These micro SMEs and consumers are also denied formal working capital or loans due to absence of data,” said Anup Jain, Managing Partner at Orios Venture Partners.
He added: “CityCash is uniquely positioned to create a transit-led, offline tap-n-pay ecosystem on the lines of globally successful models of HK octopus and London Oyster.”
CityCash designs, deploys and operates low cost offline and online payment technologies focused on the underserved space of high volume, low value micropayments. The company is creating a merchant-centric payments ecosystem through strategic alliances with various Government bodies, banks, merchants and technology vendors.
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