CIOInsider India Magazine
.png){kind=logo}
Suresh Kakarla, CEO
Srikanth Mopidevi, MD & CIO
The fintech market is rapidly evolving, driven by technological advancements and changing consumer behaviors. Clients have increasingly high expectations from their fintech solution providers in this dynamic landscape. Beyond traditional financial services, clients now demand seamless user experiences, personalized recommendations, real-time access to information, and enhanced security measures. Fintech companies are tasked with offering innovative and efficient solutions while also understanding and adapting to their client's evolving financial needs.
Toucan Payments is a US-based fintech company founded in 2019 by Suresh Kakarla, a successful entrepreneur known for pioneering and promoting the country-wide interoperable ETC model 'FASTag' in India through his previous endeavor, TollPlus. Toucan Payments aims to revolutionize the payment industry with its innovative and secure platforms, including Merchant Acquiring, Switching, and Card Issuance. These platforms offer streamlined merchant onboarding, real-time payments, fraud detection, and comprehensive card issuance solutions. Toucan Payments has carved a niche for itself today due to its commitment to security, utilizing tokenization, and adhering to data privacy certifications. Also, Toucan Payments has been steadfast in ensuring data remains within the country of origin to meet upcoming privacy regulations.
Toucan Payments has been abreast of the changing market dynamics through its experienced team, drawing insights from FASTag and global research on payment trends. The company employs cutting-edge technology from MongoDB, GCP, AWS, and Azure. It has a dedicated AI team to handle fraud prevention and innovative features like facial recognition for secure payments.
In an exclusive interview with CIO Insider Magazine, Suresh Kakarla, CEO, and Srikanth Mopidevi, MD & CIO, walks us through the unique attributes of Toucan Payments.
Tell us about your flagship offerings & what value additions customers can expect from your offerings.
Suresh: Our team boasts deep technology, domain expertise, and customer focus. Our insights in the payment market, particularly merchant acquiring, switching, and card issuing, expose critical gaps in current solutions. Issues arise from outdated legacy technology and fragmented approaches. Unlike our holistic platform, existing offerings lack a unified 360-degree customer view driven by data. Existing systems often rely on disjointed solutions. Security is an after thought rather than embedded like in Toucan solutions. Scalability and auto-scaling challenges hinder growth in a digitized payment landscape
Toucan Payments seamlessly integrates cutting-edge technology, security, & customer-centricity to redefine the future of payments
We offer three unique, highly scalable, secure platforms: Merchant Acquiring, Switching, and Card Issuance. The Merchant Acquiring Platform streamlines merchant onboarding, AML, and fraud detection while offering real-time payments, settlements, reconciliation, and dispute management. Our Switching Platform communicates seamlessly with major providers Visa, Mastercard, Amex, Rupay, and UPI. Toucan Switch can also be deployed at a bank, country, or global level, offering immense scale and flexibility due to its inherent dynamic routing capabilities. The Card Issuance Platform covers virtual, physical, debit, credit, prepaid, closed loop, and open-loop cards. What differentiates us is the comprehensive scope and inherent security with cloud scale and agility. The platform, rooted in tokenization, embodies our commitment to security. It's natively built on Cloud for scalability, resiliency, and high availability. Our solution redefines FinTech with end-to-end customer-centricity woven with core security and adaptable cloud deployment.
How do you ensure the security of the client’s data while leveraging hassle free services and solutions?
Srikanth: Our platform's foundation is tokenization enhancing security beyond encryption. Tokenization requires both a token and a key for data access, fortifying protection. We avoid storing personally identifiable information (PII), aligning with PCI DSS ISO 27001
certifications. Pursuing PA DSS PA SSS certifications showcases our commitment to data security. We host data within the country of origin to meet upcoming data privacy regulations. This strategy addresses privacy concerns and allows deployment without cross border data transfers in various locations.
Srikanth Mopidevi, MD & CIO
How do you understand dynamic customer behavior and keep up with the changes in the market trends? What are the latest technology trends adopted by the company?
Srikanth: Several factors shape our proposition. Our team’s experience spans the payment, banking, and tech sectors, a foundation. Insights from FASTag drive us towards hyper-personalization. FASTag's precision mindset guides our flawless execution toward payments. Global research reveals trends (e.g., UPI, mobile payments, blockchain, and digital currency). Tech-wise, MongoDB, GCP, AWS, and Azure form our adaptable platform. A 20–25-member Machine Learning and AI expert team handles fraud, data lake, computer vision, and more. Exploring facial recognition for secure payments aligns with future form factors and enables omnichannel experiences. Our approach blends expertise, experience, global outlook, tech, and innovation for a robust payment ecosystem. Our distinctive approach results from a potent blend of expert backgrounds, hands-on experience, a global outlook, cutting-edge technology choices, and ongoing innovation, culminating in a robust and innovative payment ecosystem.
What are the plans for Toucan Payments? How does it plan to execute them?
Suresh: We plan to transition its platform to accommodate digital currencies, leveraging blockchain technology for seamless transactions. We also aim to facilitate cross-border international remittances using blockchain technology. Furthermore, the focus would be to disrupt the payment industry by offering a merchant-centric, technologically advanced platform for banks, acquirers, aggregators, and merchants, setting new standards in the market.
