Revolutionising Payment Solutions For SMBs

Debasish Guha Roy, CEO and Founder, YouCloud Paytech DIFC, talks about the entrepreneurial journey and the importance of staying up to date with technology

Below are excerpts of the interview.

Tell us about your professional journey and how you came to be the CEO of YouCloud?

My professional journey began in 1987. Over the years, I rose through the ranks to become the COO of Emircom/Telelogix in Abu Dhabi based leading ICT player, where I also had a stake. In the year 2011, I decided to take the plunge and start my own entrepreneurship journey, which resulted in the establishment of YouCloud DMCC. The year 2022 was another transformative one for YouCloud. We raised capital through new shareholders to meet the company’s funding requirement to guarantee our continued success in the future. We established YouCloud payment practice as a separate entity in DIFC to focus on fintech services.

Our product team has taken the product from a standalone solution to a comprehensive SMB ecosystem platform wherein we allow merchants, suppliers, financial players, and government compliance to interact digitally and transparently.

I feel immensely satisfied when I look back from a humble beginning of just two employees, to be a dedicated CEO leader with a strong team of 50+ members spread across direct operations in India, Sri Lanka, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, and Bangladesh, and strong partnerships in Australia and Zambia.

What is the core area of business and the services you provide?

YouCloud provides payment, commerce and analytics. We offer a range of solutions that include payment gateways, point of sale (POS) hardware and software. Our offering is in SaaS model. This is all-in-one solution for retailers and restaurant owners with inventory management, payment acceptance, easy book-keeping and promotions and loyalty. YouCloud aims at building a network of like-minded merchants and creating an ecosystem of retailers with customers and suppliers. Our core services are: merchant aggregation, payment aggregation, VAS aggregation and credit scoring.

What is the competitive edge you have?

Our competitive edge is that you don't need capital expenditure (CAPEX) to start with us, no IT personnel required. We accept digital payments with synchronised accounts and provide reports for real time P&L. We allow selling across multiple channels, in-shop, webshop (online) and socialshop (social shop) with a synchronised inventory, respective of store location or number of stores. We also have a built-in loyalty programme module, alerts and notifications feature for low stocks expiry products. We are 100 per cent local tax compliant and lastly, we are a single point of service for hardware or software support, which gives comfort to our customers

YouCloud, being a technology company, needs to stay on top of the latest technology, therefore, what steps do you take to stay in-line with the frequently changing trends?

To ensure that we remain current with technology for our customers, we take the following steps:

•Regular Training: We offer a variety of training programmes to our team, including in-house training, attending external seminars and webinars, and attending industry conferences to acquire latest skills and knowledge.

•Industry Research: Our team stays up-to-date by regularly attending industry conferences, reading industry publications, and following industry influencers and thought leaders on social media.

•Innovation Projects: We invest in innovation projects to explore emerging technologies and stay ahead of the curve.

Some of the key milestones are:

2011: Founded YouCloud DMCC under Contec Technologies

2016: Became a merchant aggregator for Axis Bank in India

2018: Launched Now Now Wallet in Nigeria and Zimbabwe

2020 - 2022: Launched YouShop and YouResto in Sri Lanka and expanded our markets in India, Australia, Kenya, Senegal, Nigeria and Bangladesh.

What are your future plans and where do you see YouCloud over the next few years? Any message for the upcoming generation?

YouCloud Pay has a clear intent of expanding services to more territories like Egypt, Zimbabwe, Germany, UK, Uganda and Rwanda. We are looking to establish YouCloud Africa with the intent to be the game changer for small business owners in the African continent. YouCloud has a goal to digitise 100K merchants and increase our revenue to $20 million. We also look forward to expand to eight more countries.

• Business Technology Review