We are growing 30-35% and will be investing more and more into technology

Virender Bisht, CTO, MobiKwik has worked on several IT projects into e-commerce, mobile, online payments, content management, and enterprise software. In an interaction with Dataquest, he talks about his new role in MobiKwik and what would be the key focus areas for him. Excerpts

You have recently moved from a travel industry to online payment gateways, tell us about the thought behind this move. What all you would be taking care of in MobiKwik?

At heart I am a technology guy, and technology is my domain but I am not married to a particular domain. For the past 14 years, I have worked in different verticals including healthcare, game generation, network field communication, education, travel and within travel I worked in payments, mobile, etc. The domain has come by own, but what it is important for me is to leverage technology into a right direction to solve the problem for a particular domain.In my previous role, I was managing mobile development at MakeMyTrip. And today at MobiKwik, (a hardcore payment industry), there is a combination of mobile and payments. So I look the area is much broader here when you have a large amount of activities to be done. Payment is a major activity in both the roles.

IT being the backbone of the entire working scenario, please brief us about the tech team and how are you managing your business?

We are a team of more than 30 people in technology which includes developers, front and back-end developers, system administrators, there are people managing datacenters, quality and assurance and interface designing. When it comes to managing our business, many aspects of our business including the development, design, quality and assurance resource is being managed by our own team. We do have our own remote server management service, therefore, there is nothing outsourced except a bit of security.

Security is a big issue when it comes to online payments. How at MobiKwik are you handling this critical aspect of business?

For security, we always work with expert security consultants and they look at the major issues that may arise during online mobile payment. We are not sticky with this domain but it is the third party on which we depend on to outsource the security solution. They keep us helping on the security issues and threats that may occur and impact our payment business. And ofcourse there are certain things you have to comply with including PCI, 3.0 is the recent that we are improving. These are some of the mandatory in nature but ofcourse we are also looking at security by our own for web application, mobile apps, and mobile payment. Rest, we use latest firewalls technology to protect the online security threats.

Most of the e-commerce companies are analytics driven, how do you pace into this space?

More and more data is available in the digital space, but it’s only up to us how we are harnessing this data to make the right decision that an analytics person provides who is sitting in-front.

We do have some in-house data analytics solution. We are using the cloud based open source (SaaS) for analytics. Beyond that we are using our own internal marketing tools that we have developed in-house. We have just started it so there will be our huge investment in upcoming years.

What are the key focus areas for MobiKwik?

Security and compliances are very important areas for us. From product point of view, we will include some other essential features and the overall idea is to create more and more value for the consumers.

Another focus area is how we can create an automatic system for our people and stakeholders. We will be focusing on creating a toll so that the entire team can see what is happening in the entire cycle. It is more like plying with the analytics and data so that they can easily launch any kind of campaign.

The third area will be creating a target place. We are growing 30-35% in this market and have crossed 5 mn android apps download so far. We all are really proud of that but if you look at the headroom there is much more to grow. So in that sense, technology has the key pace for the overall performance. We will be investing more and more into technology so there will be better customer experience at end user. More use cases, automation and performance and scale will be our focus area.