Happay, a business expense management company based in India, has landed a partnership with HDFC Bank, reports in Business Standard said on Monday (March 5).
The company will link HDFC small business (SMB) customers to its travel and expense management solution, which is tied to a prepaid card. The tool enables entrepreneurs to manage employee spend while on business trips.
Reports cited Forrester Research, which found that while India’s corporate travel industry was growing, travel and expense management, as cited by entrepreneurs, was the second-most difficult expense to manage.
“Our partnership with Happay has been very encouraging so far,” said HDFC Bank Country Head — Card Payment Products, Merchant Acquiring and Marketing, Parag Rao, according to the publication. “Together with Happay, our aim is to completely reinvest the way Indian corporates manage their business payments.”
“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,” added Happay Co-Founder and CEO Anshul Rai. “HDFC Bank gave us the opportunity to scale up fast in a short period of time. The success we saw is a testimony to the resilient and scalable infrastructure we have built. We hope to continue to offer greater business value with our new offering.”
The collaboration with HDFC follows Happay’s announcement last month that it added to its Series B funding round, raising $250,000 from Cupola Venture Opportunities Dec. 2017, in addition to the $10 million the firm raised from Sequoia Capital, Axiom Capital and AME Cloud Ventures, which Happay also announced last December.
In 2016, the company expanded through the launch of its Express On-boarding Program for small businesses, which aimed to accelerate SMBs’ ability to use Happay’s solutions and to quickly shift from cash to cards to manage employee travel spend following the nation’s demonetization efforts.