ItzCash turns a page with profits, revenue jumps 40% to Rs 250 crore

BENGALURU: Payments company ItzCash turned profitable in 2016-17, according to managing director Naveen Surya. The Mumbai-based company made close to Rs 250 crore in revenue across all its businesses, a nearly 40% jump over the revenue of about Rs 180 crore in the previous fiscal.

"At the start of the financial year, we had said we would be fully profitable and we have now accomplished that despite several moving variables," Surya said.

ItzCash saw payments volume of 14,000 crore last financial year in terms of only debit transactions, Surya said. The company is seeing 6.5 lakh transactions a day.

ItzCash's chief growth officer Bhavik Vasa said the 10-year-old company had broken even in 2010, but it only had prepaid card and wallet products then. Since then, ItzCash has expanded into new businesses such as remittances, financial services and corporate products. The company recently acquired fintech startup Finly.io, which works in the corporate expense management space.

ItzCash has also entered the financial services space, providing working capital loans through NBFCs to merchants where the company is setting up point of sale (POS) machines. The company said it had deployed 30,000 PoS terminals in the past three months and aims to reach one lakh soon. "It is ingrained in our DNA to diversify our portfolio and hence our revenue is also diverisified," Vasa said.

However, so far, retail payments and remittances make 90% of the company's revenue, while the remaining comes from the financial services. The company's cloud-based solutions are present in 75,000 stores across 3,000 cities and towns, wherein the kirana store also enables bill payments and money transfer.

The Essel Group-owned digital payments company, which has so far raised about $51 million from investors such as Matrix Partners, Intel Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners, had earlier said it was considering the IPO option. "It (IPO plans) is getting stronger after this (reaching profitability)," Surya said.