Zeta to invest in AI, ML next: Ramki Gaddipati, CTO

Have you given any thought about your cafeteria, tax-saving, and rewards and recognition in your organization? Chances are you would have brushed it off as it isn’t a core functionality. But its smooth functioning is more than necessary for a corporate to operate without glitches. One company thought of it and made lives easier for the corporates. 

Zeta’s digitized tax-saving reimbursements and e-rewards and recognition and an automated cafeteria are benefitting corporate India like never before. Ramki Gaddipati, co-founder and CTO of Zeta, in his interview speaks about safer digital payments, RBI’s mandate on KYCs and future product expansion for the company.

How do you aim to make digital payments safer?

At the very offset, we have had the opportunity to build the complete payment solution ground up. We do not use any traditional payment system. We have built all the tracks ourselves. We have a total understanding of how a modern-day, intelligent connected system security texture should be, the common threats and how they work. We have a complete understanding of that and we are able to incorporate it into our products too.

We definitely take a lot of care in designing them to be secure and safe. Our entire application is protected by biometric security, if your device offers it. Every transaction will be protected by a dynamic pin that is generated on your app, device. We have a complete online system where you never have to enter a password anywhere. 

How does your R&R solution help cut down cost?

Rewards and recognition is a broad spectrum. Companies want to achieve instant gratification with employees like a reward that an employee can realize immediately. For instance, a manager on the floor has done a very big job with a client, he wants to reward him at that point. So positive enforcements matter the most. That is what corporates are looking at and we enable them through our solutions.

Second, any rewards and recognition solution, the manifestation is a lot of vendors and database processes to implement one solution. We completely eliminate all those ops and use one unified interface, where we can reward any task and bring in any recognition system into a unified platform which can be integrated into other systems through APIs. We eliminate the cost of dealing with multiple vendors and processes, so the benefits are immense.

How do you plan to overcome the KYC speed bump now?

That’s a double-edged sword. On one end customer protection is important, if you don’t take enough details into account, you cannot authenticate the user.  For example, all we have of a customer is phone number and OTP, and if he loses his number and requests for a balance statement, then how do we authenticate. Therefore, capturing additional information is very much necessary. It provides a secure transaction experience. Therefore, we have enough processes in our implementation which always collect requisite information to meaningfully authenticate the user. Privacy mandate will not affect us as it would affect any other retail company.

Tell us about the data analytics solution for automated cafeteria?

Zeta, recently expanded its automated cafeteria portfolio to offer advanced deep analytics – Express Insights. The Insights feature is a first-of-its-kind solution in the automated cafeteria industry that will offer corporates and cafeteria vendors detailed analysis to enable better food management and enhance overall cafeteria experience. Corporates using Zeta Express® can now access Express Insights to pull out information on employee purchase behavior, vendor ratings and performance, settlement reports and even draw comparisons amongst various cafeterias across office locations for overall performance. Insights also provide a detailed analysis of employee preferences such as favorite food items, least selling items, thereby helping cafeteria vendors manage inventory better and control overall food wastage.

Which verticals and technologies would you invest in next? And what are your plans for product expansion?

Currently, we are focusing on expanding our corporate payments portfolio i.e the Zeta Tax Benefits Platform.  At Zeta, we evolve rapidly and develop products depending on the client and market needs. From a technology perspective, we are investing in emerging areas like machine learning, artificial intelligence, and predictive analytics as we look to offer better services with more actionable information to our clients.