Photo of Vikrant Jindal, Lykos India Ltd and Roshan Mathew, DBS.
A new API driven collection and payments solution is helping to ensure customers of Lykos, the online commodity player, enjoy a much smoother and effective transacting experience. Lykos, meanwhile, is witnessing a reduction in customer time-outs and improved sales. The solution also provides a platform for scaling up its operations both nationally and internationally.
Vikrant Jindal
Head of Business Development and New Initiatives
Lykos India Ltd
Mumbai, India
Lykos is India’s first online refined metal platform. Launched in 2014, it is owned by Trafigura, one of the world’s leading commodity trading houses. Lykos provides its customers guaranteed metal stocks with access to index-linked prices for a range of metals that can be ordered on a need basis.
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Collections and payments solution helps Lykos to boost sales and transform customer experience
The challenge
Lykos, an online commodity player, was looking to digitise buyer payments made via its online portal. Lykos has currently over 1,000 buyers transacting on its portal, with 3,000 registered users.
Although Lykos is an online sales platform, it is different from traditional online eCommerce platforms, as the buyers on the platform are businesses and corporates themselves. In particular, the value of the transactions are much higher than that of retail ecommerce.
Due to the B2B nature of the platform and Lykos’s strong reputation, buyers are willing to pre-fund Lykos for their expected purchases, with the assurance that they can receive their idle funds back any time they need them without any delay.
Lykos needed a partner who could help design a solution capable of generating real-time updates of credits from buyers for pre-funding and initiating refund or purchase payments from the pre-funded amount instantly.
Specific problems that the solution had to overcome included Lykos being dependent on its existing bank for data on the buyer balance. Also, system time-outs between Lykos and its bank meant that there were instances of failed transactions, which led to loss of sales and customer dissatisfaction.
The solution
Lykos partnered up with DBS to implement an API driven collections and payments system.
The DBS solution features a dynamic virtual accounts structure for Lykos’s pre-funding account, where Lykos’s buyers credit funds for future purchases on the Lykos portal. This dynamic virtual accounts structure allows Lykos to auto-assign a virtual account number to a buyer upon registration on its portal.
When buyers initiate pre-funding of their virtual accounts with Lykos, credits are received to Lykos’s DBS account through various settlement modes like RTGS, NEFT, telegraphic transfers or IMPS. When buyers utilise their pre-funded balances with Lykos for a purchase on their portal, Lykos can reduce their prefunded limit.
The DBS solution significantly accelerates the transaction flow, as Lykos has all the wallet information available in real-time in its own system. Buyers can now transact on the website without having to worry about the connectivity issues with the bank. Moreover, the solution is scalable and can be replicated in multiple geographies.
Best practice and innovation
The API-based payment settlement and credit alerts is one of the best use cases of APIs for large value settlement/transactions in the B2B space. It overcomes the drawback of payment gateways, which are typically designed for low value transactions and are costly.
Given the strength of the solution and the regional footprint of DBS, with the bank’s sizeable presence in China, Lykos has found this solution highly replicable, with minimal development efforts needed to deploy it in that country.
Key benefits
The comprehensive solution designed by DBS for Lykos significantly improves efficiency across its business and the user experience of its customers.
Other key benefits of the solution include:
- Enables expansion of a range of offerings and payment modes on Lykos’ portal.
- Significant new business use cases where buyers can pay partially to reserve stock and then take delivery at a desired date as per their needs.
- Solution works even when connectivity between Lykos and DBS is down, translating into more business.
- Refunds now being sent to buyers even when normal banking hours are closed.
- Trust in the portal is enhanced.
- API credit alerts, digital notification of credits and automated updating of customer ledgers ensures that Lykos’s customers can transact efficiently.
- Scalability of solution will help support growth and expansion in other markets.
