Launch HN: Cashfree (YC S17) – Automated Payouts and Bank Transfers for India

Hey HN! I am Akash, co-founder of Cashfree(https://www.cashfree.com).

Cashfree is India'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.

We help businesses like fintech platforms and marketplaces to easily setup custom payment flows to receive and disburse money.

Cashfree is being used for automated payouts and collections for use cases like -

* Supply chain collections by distributors

* Crowdfunding campaigns

* Marketplace vendor settlements

* Instant deposits and withdrawals at bitcoin exchanges

* Payroll for on-demand economy workers

* Loan disbursal and repayment by lenders

* Invoice payments at Modern ERP and Accounting tools

* Instant refunds (versus 5-7 days presently)

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.

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.

Would love to answer your questions about Cashfree and look forward to discuss anything on payments and bank transfers.

Hi, Thanks for looking around. You might have seen the documentation of Cashfree Payment Gateway and yes, it's not restful.

Documentation of Bank transfer products (Payout and NEFT re-conciliation) is not public yet. We send it to our merchants during their on-boarding. We understand that it makes evaluation by new/prospective customers at bit harder and thus, are in-process of revamping our doc site to include documentation of all the products we support.

Do drop us a note at care@gocashfree.com. We will share it with you.

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

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!

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...). 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.