Two young entrepreneurs take on the Australian domestic payments scene

Kuber Financial is transforming the payment landscape in Australia by implementing QR code technology and PAY-ID, offering seamless, surcharge-free transactions similar to India’s UPI system. With its user-friendly approach, Kuber is making payments more accessible and cost-effective for both merchants and consumers.

Today, the app has surpassed 1,500+ downloads and is live at over 20 merchants, further solidifying its presence as a leader in modern payment solutions across the country.

Kartikeya Dwivedi and Vihan Bawa were 24 and 23 years old respectively in 2021 when they decided to collaborate on a solution that would reimagine how domestic payments were being done in Australia.

While Vihan had been working in the banking sector as a Financial Crime Analyst and saw first hand how being a consumer in Australia was getting progressively unaffordable.

Kartikeya on the other hand had experience in product development and was working in the public sector and had recently seen the meteoric rise of mobile phones in making consumer payments through the use of QR Codes internationally. It was clear that there was a demand for contactless payments especially after the pandemic.

Realising the opportunity, both of them decided to up-skill and fine-tune their skillset in a way where they can develop a product to service this demand. As a result, Vihan and Kartikeya enrolled in programmes at University of Michigan and Harvard University to read Fintech respectively.

The state of Consumer Payments in Australia

While there has been a significant level of innovation in international and online payments, consumer payments in Australia have historically been dominated by cards and terminal machines. However, the rise of direct bank-to-bank technologies like PayiD and PayTo represent a real challenge to this status-quo.

Making consumer payments has always been convenient, but the bottlenecks start emerging when it comes to accepting them. The problem on this side is structural, with too many parties involved in the transaction chain. Issuers, Acquires and Card Networks are the extra stakeholders which have to be paid to complete a transaction apart from the buyer and the seller.

Making a payment in 2024 cannot be this inefficient, not to mention this unsafe, given how many instances of fraudulent transactions trace their origin to lapses in security around card data.

The mission at Kuber

Drawing from the innovations around the world in digital payments, the mission at Kuber is to revolutionise how consumer payments are done across Australia.

The key problem with card based transactions is that they are inefficient, expensive and unsafe.

New technologies like PayiD and PayTo are promising alternatives but they are foundational solutions existing at a higher level. The infrastructure for them to be adopted on a scale as wide as cards is yet to be built. That is where Kuber comes in.

Kuber is building the infrastructure that allows businesses to side-step cumbersome and expensive payment setups and adopt a singular solution bundle that solves their ordering, inventory, invoicing and payment needs. The key difference here being that these payments occur directly between the bank accounts of the buyer and the seller with Kuber being the only intermediary.

Talking about the mission at Kuber, Vihan mentioned that, “Payments as a market is very inelastic, businesses will not be keen to change their payment provider regularly so you have to come up with a significant value add to even make them think about doing it.”

Kuber as a stack

After years of iterating and incorporating feedback from merchants, the team at Kuber concluded that the only way to disrupt the way businesses accept payments is to replace the entire architecture with which the old payment methods are connected.

This gave birth to the idea of building a stack that acts as a single plug and play solution for a business. With Kuber, a business can manage their inventories, accept orders from customers, invoice directly into their bank accounts and accept direct bank transfers against those invoices.

Since all transactions are authorised from the customer’s banking applications, the transactions enjoy a very high level of security and are settled in real time.

This kind of a solution is what businesses expect from a technology partner when they are in the market as against piecing together different software products, comparing prices and building a custom stack. With Kuber, they can relax focus on their core sales operations rather than navigating complex challenges about technology which they may not wish to deal with.

When describing the benefits of onboarding onto Kuber, Jai Bharti, owner of Lonestar Rib House Parramatta said, “I like how it is a convenient and transparent system. Compared to other solutions, I like Kuber because I don’t have to worry about any surprise costs.”

The future with Kuber

With its payment offering, Kuber has successfully entered the payments market through its merchant clients. As the business grows, Kuber is focusing on solving for the consumer side as well with a particular focus on the young professional and student demographic.

Talking about the future of the company Kartikeya said, “We are building some really interesting things at Kuber that will completely change how Australians look at underwriting credit and insurance.

“Our edge comes from the wonderful client base that gives regular feedbacks and our approach that prioritises inference over data. We are really excited to bring these products to market.”