By Sekhar Seshan. Consulting Editor, Business India

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and start-ups faced a series of challenges in managing their business finances, Anish Achuthan and Mabel Chacko found. The duo, both serial entrepreneurs in financial technology solutions, joined forces with Ajeesh Achuthan and Deena Jacob in 2017 to offer these companies a solution. 

“I realised during various interactions with business owners and entrepreneurs that business banking is broken for small businesses,” says Anish Achuthan, who has worked with many of these for 15 years through his previous payment start-ups and as part of other fintech companies. “They struggle to track their cash flows as they have to work with multiple disjointed systems like a banking dashboard, invoicing tool, payroll and accounting software that makes reconciliation a pain.”

That, adds Chacko, was when they thought the best way to solve this problem would be to turn a business current account into a financial operating system. “If we can track every payment that comes in and moves out of your bank account, we can automate income, expenses and accounting for your business,” she explains.

This led to the start of Open Financial Technologies, through which they offer businesses a banking platform with integrated tools for invoicing, billing, accounting and payroll built into the internet banking dashboard, so that they can automate their finance. In the three years since they began, Open now boasts a customer list of a million, processing $24 billion in transactions annually to make it the largest growing SME-focussed neo-banking platform globally. 

Open, which is Asia’s first neo-banking platform for SMEs and start-ups, offers its customers a business account in partnership with banks that helps them automate and run their finances effectively. Originally funded by Beenext, Japan’s Recruit Strategic Partners, Unicorn India Ventures, Art Capital and other angel investors, Open has recently raised a Series B funding of $30 million led by Tiger Global, Tanglin Venture Partners Advisors and existing investors 3one4 Capital, Speedinvest and BetterCapital AngelList Syndicate.

Scaling user base

The initial growth strategy, explains Achuthan, who is the chief executive officer, was to partner with banks, which would also distribute Open’s platform to their own clients. “This gave us a lot of insights into the customer pain points and distributing the products to Tier II and Tier III audiences, which really helped us in scaling our user base,” he says.

Using its existing customers as evangelists for word-of-mouth references, Open has a million customers registered on its platform. In February 2021, it acquired GST automation platform Optobizz for $5 million in a stock-plus-cash deal. With 800,000 businesses using it, this takes Open’s customer base to 1.8 million SMEs.

Additionally, they are adding nearly 60,000 new businesses every month on the platform. “We have also increased our bank distribution platforms to seven banks, which will help us scale our customer base and also strengthen our mobile platform to get to our target of five million users by the end of next year,” Achuthan says.