Standing from Left to Right
Manoj Wijewardane - Manager - Digital Commerce - Seylan Bank, Chaminda Senewiratne - Head of Digital Banking Channels - Seylan Bank, Urmila Chandrasekeram - Chief Executive Officer / Co-founder - Mintpay and Kukaraj Tharmasegaram - Chief Technology Officer/ Co-founder - Mintpay
The 1st of March 2021 marked the beginning of a revolutionary partnership between Seylan Bank and Mintpay, a platform that is the first to offer customers the option to Buy Now, Pay Later for any product or service offered by merchants powered by Mintpay’s AI-driven payment platform. While the market is used to instalment based payments through many financial service providers, where they’re expected to either go to the merchant location and ask that their transaction be converted to an Instalment based plan or call their financial service provider to request for the transaction to be converted to an instalment plan. Mintypay is a bank agnostic and will eventually also be a merchant agnostic payment platform that will manage this process automatically.
This partnership opens up a host of opportunities for Online shoppers in Sri Lanka. through the proprietary technology developed by Algoredge (PVT) LTD, we can now provide both merchants and consumers across the island with a novel online shopping experience. Customers will be able to use the Mintpay payment platform with any of their merchant partners to split their shopping cost into 3 interest-free payments over a payback period of two months. The solution typically allows the customer to check out at any online shop that is registered with Mintpay (https://mintpay.lk/) and use their credentials to log in and make the payment which automatically converts their payment to an instalment plan.
Sharing his thoughts on the partnership Mintpay Chief Technology Officer Kukaraj Tharmasegaram said “the start-up” was inspired by the thought of hundreds of eager customers not being able to purchase goods due to the unavailability of credit at a time of need, hence not being able to use their Debit Cards. There are far more debit cards in the market when compared to credit cards and typically a debit card is linked into a bank account which may, or may not have the funds required for purchase at any given time. Thereby Mintpay enables a Customer to pay for a certain transaction in instalments rather than having to pay the full amount at once. Apart from the above, the Machine Learning and Data Analysis based approach enables the Mintpay Operational Platform together with the Decisioning Engine to make predictive judgements to ensure that all stakeholders are secured. The platform will also provide customers with information about their purchases for future online purchases.
The registration process to Mintpay is easy and hassle-free. One could consider this service as a cash advance service for the customer while enabling the merchants to receive the entire purchase value at the time of purchase itself. These attributes will minimise payment collection issues and avoid having to wait for 3 months to collect funds for already purchased products.
An initial test-launch was coordinated in September 2020, the Mintpay team has been able to confirm the viability of their service and iterate further to develop an end-to-end seamless user experience. This will help minimize transactional losses, assist in maintaining competitive pricing while providing merchants with plenty of data that can be used as the foundation for future strategic growth.
An essential step forward for the e-commerce platform was made possible through this partnership. Merchants are quickly realizing the value of increased conversion rates that come with providing customers with a Buy Now, Pay Later payment method.
“The solution is revolutionary; as it’s the first homegrown payment platform of this nature that has been launched in Sri Lanka. Seylan Bank has always placed itself in the forefront of embracing innovative customer-centric solutions that are profoundly needed in the rapidly evolving financial ecosystem in Sri Lanka” said Chami Senewiratne Head of Digital Banking, Seylan Bank. This foresight and vision will enable all customers and merchants to enjoy the flexibility and convenience that is brought to the table by the Mintpay technology and powered by Seylan Bank.
