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User:Chetan.bhatia/sandbox

Summary

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Citrus Payment Gateway
 
Citrus Payment Gateway.png
TypePrivate
Foundation2011
HeadquartersMumbai, India
FoundersJitendra Gupta, Satyen Kothari
IndustryMobile payments, Payment Gateway, Merchant Account, Recurring Billing, Customer vault
Employees50 (2013)
Websitehttp://www.citruspay.com/

Citrus Payment is a payment gateway provider from India allowing payments and money transfers to be made through the internet via multiple devices. Credit / debit & bank account transaction is enabled securely through Citrus Pay's electronic platform. It offers payment options for consumers and merchants in India and Asia with provisions of Netbanking payments, IVR, Mobile, Loyalty solutions, Credit & Debit cards payments and Prepaid wallet issuance along with mobile optimized payment experience.

Headquartered in Mumbai, India, Citrus Pay was founded in 2011 by a group of software design and finance professionals who saw space for simplification and innovation in the world of payments in Asia. Citrus Payment is incorporated under laws of Indian Companies Act. It is started by ex-ICICI banker Jitendra Gupta along with Satyen Kothari. Satyen is a Silicon Valley veteran who’s spent last 16 years at Silcon Valley and worked at corporations like Apple and has had experience consulting for industry biggies like Intuit. Jitendra on the other hand, brings vast experience from the banking sector with his stint with ICICI Bank and has handled various verticals there.[1]

Citrus has roped in Sequoia Capital as its financial investor and has recently raised USD 5.5 Mn series B funding from Sequoia Capital. Sequoia has been investor in Paypal, Greendot (Prepaid cards) and Yahoo in US and carries a strong experience in payments domain. Backed by Sequoia Capital, Citrus payment gateway offers features such as Single citrus click checkout, In-App purchases, etc. at a zero setup cost and low TDR charges.


History

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  1. April 2011: Citrus Pay Company is incorporated and Angel Investment is received [2]
  2. November 2011: First production transaction is fired [2]
  3. Jan 2012: USD $ 1.8 million is raised from Sequoia Capital [3]
  4. Nov 2012: 100 thousand transactions processed in a month
  5. July 2013: Reserve Bank of India (RBI) License received for stored value payments using proprietary IP
  6. Aug 2013: 1 million transactions processed in a month
  7. Nov 2013: 2 million transactions processed in a month [2]
  8. Dec 2013: USD $ 5.5 million is raised in Series B funding [4]


Initial challenges

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As a startup, getting a proper team in place was one of the biggest challenges. The founders during the initial period of the company took two months to get their first 10 clients. “I used to spend hours on LinkedIn to identify right the people and then follow it up by meetings in coffee shops. We didn’t have an office in the first six months. Coffee shops and hotel lobbies were our meeting points with potential partners and employees,” says Jitendra; one of the founders of Citrus Payment Solutions.[5]

Loyalty and gaining trust amongst merchants and consumers alike was another challenge during the initial phase. Citrus Pay had its own set of challenges to gain trust in the merchant community and the consumers. “We took six months in crossing our first 10K consumers for Citrus Checkout but now we add the same in less than a week,” [5] says Jitendra Gupta. The company spent significant amount of time in creating the market for its product.


Features and Products

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Citrus Express Checkout
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Citrus express check-out reduces the time needed by the customer to complete his/her online transaction details from second transaction onwards. This considerably reduces the check-out time for repeat clients and improves customer experience on merchant website. [6]

Citrus intakes user data during registration process and the next time the user visits Citrus Pay checkout, it provides the user details on all necessary fields before hand, leaving the user to only validate the transaction using CVV and security password.


Multi Device Usage
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Citrus Payment gateway provides compatibility with mobile and tablet devices. The merchants after signup can have their branded payment pages across all devices.


Email Invoicing
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A provision for merchants to send out email invoices with Pay Now links to the customers. On clicking the pay now link the complete offline payment can be collected online. Citrus's email invoicing enables merchants to get a complete record of invoices raised vs invoice paid online as well as track payments. [7]


Wallet
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A provision to create a wallet is made available to the consumers for convenient and fast shopping experience across multiple merchant websites. Citrus Wallet, also known as Citrus Checkout, is the company’s flagship product where consumers can create a wallet with pre-filled amount of money for convenient shopping experience across multiple merchant sites. eBay - owned Paypal launched such wallets in other parts of the world.


Retry Framework - Reduce transaction Drop off rate
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In order to prevent of transactions falling apart from the payment gateway or banks end due to technicalities or errors, a provision of retry payments is offered to the customers. Citrus's Retry Framework automates retry of failed payments at desired frequencies to give a successful transaction back.

Citrus pay has tied up with more than 5 payment gateways to provide alternate payment process in case failure of transaction during first attempt. Citrus has engineered a technology that automatically sniffs for a payment gateway that is down and uses another one, thereby significantly reducing the failure rate for online payments. So even when a transaction fails, the customer finds himself staying on the payments page instead of basic information filling page. If all options fail, it suggests cash on delivery option thereby ensuring the placement of the order.


Net Banking Option

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Citrus Payment Gateway provides facilitation of online transaction through 20 net banking platforms i.e. State Bank of India, ICICI Bank, Axis Bank, HDFC Bank, IDBI, Indian Bank, Federal Bank, Yes Bank, Citibank, Deutsche Bank, State Bank of Travancore, State Bank of Bikaner and Jaipur, State Bank of Hyderabad, Central Bank of India, Bank of India, Indian Overseas Bank, State Bank of Mysore and Union Bank.


Technology and Regulations

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Citrus Payment Gateway is fully PCI compliant with the payment industry's highest security standard PCI-DSS 2.0. [8]

Citrus Pay provides merchants multiple integration options such as Open Cart, Drupal, Classic ASP, ASP.NET, Java, Php, Magento, Joomla, Prestashop, CS-cart, Zencart, J2store, Ruby [9]

Citrus's application architecture has redundancy built at every level. The software systems run on a dedicated and redundant server setup which is protected by hardware firewalls and an intrusion detection system. Citrus Payment use state of the Art Enterprise Software Stack - Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) running on hardened and Security Enhanced (SE) Linux (Cent OS) servers. Traffic is transmitted via hardware load balancer and is encrypted using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol with industry best 256 bit encryption.

Citrus is hosted at Tier IV data center with redundant electricity and bandwidth pipes. This ensures maximum up-time and high quality performance of the systems across hardware and software.


Customer support

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Citrus Pay customer support is handled via email, phone and Facebook fan page via Freshdesk.


Business Model

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  • Percentage commission on transactions routed through Citrus checkout

Citrus payment processor charges a certain % value per transaction as processing fees and pays the net difference to the merchant. Presently Citrus Payment Gateway charges 2.5% as processing fee for 0-100 transactions/month. [9]

  • SaaS Package fee based on volume + services used by merchant


Financials

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  • First round funding: Citrus Pay confirms $2 million funding from Sequoia Capital; Mohit Bhatnagar on board.

http://yourstory.com//2013/03/citrus-pay-confirms-2-million-funding-from-sequoia-capital-mohit-bhatnagar-on-board/

  • Second round funding: Citrus Payment ropes in econtext Asia, Beenos Asia to raise Rs 33.9 crore for expansion plans [10]

Recently (Dec 2013) Citrus Pay has raised $5.5 million in Series B funding from the Japanese online payments service provider e-Context Asia and Netprice.com’s wholly owned subsidiary Beenos Asia with participation from existing investor Sequoia Capital. e-Context is largest payments company in Japan and Netprice has been investing in lot of marketplaces across Asian markets.[11] http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2013-12-09/news/44989106_1_winvest-holdings-prizm-payment-payment-processing


References

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  1. ^ "Citrus Pay founder's background". yourstory.com.
  2. ^ a b c "Citrus Pay timeline, funding and history".
  3. ^ "Citrus Pay confirms $2 million funding from Sequoia Capital". http://yourstory.com. Retrieved 20 March 2013. {{cite web}}: External link in |publisher= (help)
  4. ^ "$5.5 mullion Series B funding - Citrus Pay". yourstory.com.
  5. ^ a b "Building the initial team was challenging". yourstory.com.
  6. ^ "Express checkout - Citrus Pay". Citrus Pay.
  7. ^ "Tracking payment records and invocing". Citrus Pay.
  8. ^ "Citrus pay security and technology information". citruspay.com.
  9. ^ a b "Merchant account fees and features". Citrus Pay.
  10. ^ "Citrus Second round of funding of US $ 5.5 million". Econimic Times - India.
  11. ^ "Citrus Series B funding". yourstory.com.
Additional references
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