Happay and HDFC Bank Jon Hands for Travel Solutions for Indian SMEs

Happay, a business expense management solution provider, in collaboration with HDFC bank, has introduced a new prepaid card linked T&E (Travel and Entertainment) expense management solution to enable Indian enterprises efficiently manage their business travel expenditure.

HDFC Bank and Happay are launching this solution at a time when Indian business travel is on the rise and Travel and Entertainment (T&E) expense still remains the second most difficult operating expense to control in an organization as per Forrester Research.

With Happay-HDFC Bank prepaid cards and Happay mobile app in their pockets, business travelers will be able to easily seek trip advances, get trip itineraries pre-approved by management, do trip bookings and file trip expenses digitally and on the move.

Management, on the other hand, will be able to manage employee cards online - from loading and withdrawing funds from cards, setting card limits, activating and deactivating cards. They will also be able to pre-authorise trip itineraries, track travel expenditure as it happens, approve travel claims, implement travel policies and view travel spend analytics from a single, cloud-based platform.

Prior to this initiative, HDFC Bank and Happay had joined hands in 2016 to help businesses go cashless and have seen huge success till date. One of their solutions, Happay-HDFC Bank’s Fleet Xpress program launched in 2016 November, enabled 1000+ transport and trucking companies to move to digitization, post demonetization. HDFC Bank’s wide reach, huge customer network and strong brand name, played a key role in enabling Happay to scale up its efforts towards helping businesses go digital.

Mr. Parag Rao, Country Head - Card payment products, merchant acquiring and marketing, HDFC Bank, quotes, “Our partnership with Happay has been very encouraging so far. With the new T&E solution, we hope to see even better response from our enterprise customers. Together with Happay, our aim is to completely reinvent the way Indian corporates manage their business payments. With Happay’s powerful and unique technology, data analytics and highly configurable platform, we hope to continue to strengthen our market position and provide enhanced value to our corporate customers.”

Anshul Rai, Co-Founder & CEO, Happay, “When we rolled out Happay’s B2B solution in 2015, our mission was to accelerate the pace of innovation and digitization in the B2B payment industry. HDFC Bank gave us the opportunity to scale up fast in a short period of time. Their strong brand name and relationship with corporate customers helped us overcome the challenges we faced with some companies skeptical of exploring digital and cloud-based solutions. The success we saw is testimony to the resilient and scalable infrastructure we have built. We hope to continue to offer greater business value with our new offering.”

Founded in 2012 by IIT Kharagpur graduates Anshul Rai and Varun Rathi, Happay has 4500+ clients across 30+ business verticals. With an overall employee base of 250+, Happay is present in 10 cities, with partners in 27 cities in India.

Happay recently raised $10 Million (INR 65.13 Crore) in a Series B Funding round led by existing investor Sequoia Capital and Singapore-based Axiom Capital. AME Cloud Ventures (the venture fund led by Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang) and existing investor - Prime Venture Partners among others also participated in the round and continued to show support to Happay’s long-term vision of being an end-to-end business spend management platform. The company plans to use the fresh influx of funds for building a deeper payment and spend management platform, expanding its team, launching new products and acquiring larger Enterprise customers (Enterprises with employee size of 1000+). Happay is building the right partner ecosystem and with more capital is aiming to reach 10000 customers by 2019.