HDFC, Happay partner to help firms manage T&E expenses

New Delhi [India], Mar. 5 (ANI): Happay, a business expense management solution provider, in collaboration with HDFC bank, introduced a new prepaid card-linked Travel and Entertainment (T&E) expense management solution to enable Indian enterprises to efficiently manage their business travel expenditure.

The launch follows a report published by Forrester Research, an American market research company, which stated that Indian business travel is on the rise and T&E expense still remains the second most difficult operating expense to control in an organisation.

With Happay-HDFC Bank prepaid cards and Happay mobile app in their pockets, business travellers will be able to easily seek trip advances, get trip itineraries pre-approved by management, do trip bookings and file trip expenses digitally and on the move.

The company management, on the other hand, will be able to manage employee cards online - from loading and withdrawing funds from cards, setting card limits, activating and deactivating cards. They will also be able to pre-authorise trip itineraries, track travel expenditure as it happens, approve travel claims, implement travel policies and view travel spend analytics from a single, cloud-based platform.

Prior to this initiative, HDFC Bank and Happay had joined hands in 2016 to help businesses go cashless. One of their solutions, Happay-HDFC Bank's Fleet Xpress program launched in 2016 November, enabled over 1000 transport and trucking companies to move to digitisation, post demonetisation.

"Our partnership with Happay has been very encouraging so far. With the new T&E solution, we hope to see even better response from our enterprise customers. Together with Happay, our aim is to completely reinvent the way Indian corporates manage their business payments," said HDFC Bank Country Head - Card payment products, merchant acquiring and marketing, Parag Rao.

"When we rolled out Happay's B2B solution in 2015, our mission was to accelerate the pace of innovation and digitisation in the B2B payment industry. 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," added Happay Co-founder and CEO, Anshul Rai.

Founded in 2012 by IIT Kharagpur graduates Anshul Rai and Varun Rathi, Happay has over 4500 clients across 30 business verticals. With an overall employee base of 250, Happay is present in 10 cities, with partners in 27 cities in India.

The company recently raised USD 10 million in a Series B funding round led by existing investor Sequoia Capital and Singapore-based Axiom Capital. AME Cloud Ventures (the venture fund led by Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang) and existing investor - Prime Venture Partners among others also participated in the round.

Happay plans to use the fresh influx of funds for building a deeper payment and spend management platform, expanding its team, launching new products and acquiring larger enterprise customers. It also aims to reach 10000 customers by 2019. (ANI)