In a competitive business, PayU India finds focus

Planning, incentive, and human resource solutions help fintech leader sharpen its focus and remain competitive

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In the crowded, competitive market of payment aggregators, PayU India wanted to be more internally efficient and offer more value to its customers. It addressed these challenges with Anaplan-based solutions for budgeting, sales incentives, and headcount planning. Now, business leaders better understand their budgets at a granular level and have a real-time view of achievements, salespeople are more motivated to cross-sell new offerings, and headcount planning and efficiency mapping ensure that costs are under control. Reporting is easier because data is centralized and there is a single source of truth. “With Anaplan, we’re more focused on the right things,” says Director of Business Finance Prateek Agarwal.

With Anaplan, we’re all more focused on work that adds value and grows the business.
Prateek Agarwal, Director of Business Finance

57%

less time spent on reporting tasks

10+ plan components

in scorecard-based incentive solution leading to increased cross-selling and customer retention

Ability

to manage headcount approval process and consequent costs

  • SOLUTIONS

    Finance, Sales & Marketing, Workforce

  • INDUSTRIES

    Business & Professional Services

  • PARTNER

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PayU, a leading online payments solution provider based out of Gurgaon, India, offers payment gateway aggregation services in a competitive market. In response, the company is diversifying its offerings and striving to keep every employee focused on work that adds value. But when Director of Business Finance Prateek Agarwal joined the company in 2018, he found that the finance team spent too much time generating and sharing financial reports. “We had very little time to do value-accretive work,” he recalls. “Plus, it was impossible for me to ensure that information was accurate because our processes were often manual.”

The company faced other challenges as well. The 150+ salesforce wasn’t adequately motivated to pursue cross-sell opportunities that generate new streams of revenue and make PayU a more valuable and “sticky” partner for its 450,000 merchant base. The company also had data-reporting issues; for example, PayU has a half-dozen business units, but financial and employee information wasn’t centrally managed so periodic reporting to PayU’s corporate parent was overly complicated and manual.

Agarwal wanted to address these challenges with a single planning solution that would reduce non-value-added activities, democratize data, share the onus of reporting and budget-building responsibilities with the business, and maintain an audit trail for key systems.

Assisted by Deloitte India, PayU India chose the Anaplan platform and built three discrete solutions: First came a budgeting solution that collects and presents financial data in near-real time and can be used to build reports and budgets. Second, a sales incentives solution that leverages a weighted point-scoring mechanism with 10+ plan components—along with multiple team structures, payout variables, and approval hierarchies—to motivate the front line. And third, a workforce solution that centrally organizes headcount data, protects sensitive information, and automates an approval workflow for new hires.

All three solutions were built over the course of several months and continue to be refined with Deloitte India’s help. Agarwal says the solutions benefit PayU in the following ways:

  • Efficiency: Information is updated and managed in one place for quick analysis, review, and reporting. Finance formerly spent too much time creating and sharing reports; with Anaplan, those tasks consume just 30% of their time, a 57% time savings.
  • Ownership: Business leaders manage their own budgets and can build and present their plans and reports with minimal finance team involvement.
  • Granularity: Budget, sales, and headcount data are all much more detailed than before, and can be sliced and analyzed in countless ways.
  • Accuracy: The sales incentives system has eliminated disputes over payouts even though the calculation mechanism is 10X more complex than before.
  • Motivation: Cross-selling has increased, and sellers are more engaged with their sales targets because their data is current.
  • Security: Sensitive data is protected, and changes are tracked for auditability.

Most important, the new Anaplan-based solution has supported a cultural shift that will help PayU remain competitive. “With Anaplan, we’re all more focused on work that adds value and grows the business,” Agarwal says. “To me, that’s success.”