Zeta App Makes Spending and Receiving Money Seamless

If saving taxes is the most predominant thought on your mind, then you have landed at the right place. Because the Zeta app provides digital corporate solutions for employee tax benefits, automated cafeterias, and digital payments.  

Zeta was founded in 2015 by entrepreneurs Bhavin Turakhia and Ramki Gaddipati. It was aimed to offer digital provisions to make everyday corporate and employee-related processes easy and efficient.

Further, in a conversation with PCQuest, Ramki Gaddipati, CTO and Co-founder, Zeta explained the ideology and technology behind the making of Zeta.

How does Zeta make payments digital, fast, inclusive and safe?

The Zeta app is a multi-faceted smartphone app for Android and iOS devices. It was primarily designed as a means to access, manage and spend tax benefits grants issued by corporates to their employees as part of the Zeta Tax benefits programme. However, the Zeta app also has several aces up its sleeve.  All Zeta Tax Benefit grants are presented in a unique card-based format in the app.

Each grant, whether fuel reimbursement, LTA or mobile & Internet reimbursement, is presented as an individual virtual card of its own. This makes keeping track of the balance in each card easy. Employees can also make paperless claims by uploading a picture of the bills through the app.

The Zeta app also makes spending these grants easy. Employees can either use Zeta’s secure transaction system to make payments at brick and mortar stores using the Zeta Super Card or spend online via the apps integrated into the Zeta app. The selection of integrated apps includes bill payment services, food ordering services, online shopping and more.

Zeta app also makes lunch orders at the office cafeteria. The app serves as a key component in the Zeta Express range of automated, cashless cafeteria solution. The app allows employees to see what’s cooking in the office cafeteria, pace their orders and pay for them too. With the help of the Zeta app and Zeta Express, organisations can automate their cafeterias and make them completely do away with long queues.

Now employees have more time for lunch and this solution saves organisations and cafeteria vendors the hassles of crowded premises and handling cash. The Zeta app also helps improve payment security on the Zeta Super Card.

Through the app, users can enable SecureShield, the Super Card’s payment security system. SecureShield includes three key features—SuperPIN, a dynamic PIN, which is refreshed every two minutes and generated through the Zeta app; Swipe2Pay, which replaces OTPs used to authenticate online payments with a slider on the Zeta app. Swiping across the slider automatically authenticates the payments.

This feature is particularly effective at preventing misuse as OTPs can be viewed from the notification tray of a smartphone even without unlocking it. Finally, with LocationShield, the Zeta app uses the user’s smartphone’s GPS location to compare the location where the Super Card is swiped. If there is a mismatch, the payment will not go through.

What was the idea behind Zeta's formation?

Zeta was founded in 2015 with the aim to offer digital solutions to make everyday corporate and employee-related processes simple and efficient. A first-of-its-kind tech platform, Zeta enables organisations to offer tax-saving employee benefits in a more convenient manner, run employee rewards and recognition programmes with ease and make corporate cafeterias more efficient.

The Zeta platform was first used to develop Zeta Tax Benefits, a suite of tax-saving employee benefits that allows organisations to administer and manage multiple benefits programmes via one online digital dashboard.

Zeta Tax Benefits digitises the entire process—from the distribution of grants at an HR manager’s end, to completely digitising the way claims are uploaded, claims tracked and the way benefits are availed the employee’s end.  Employees are able to spend the grants issued to them through the Zeta payment suite, which includes the Zeta app for smartphones and the Zeta Super Card, a prepaid card.

Tell us about your first product -  Digitised Meal Voucher

Introduced in January 2016, Zeta’s digitised meal voucher solution is a first of its kind solution in India. Employees can spend their meal vouchers for purchasing food and non-alcoholic beverages in stores and restaurants via the RuPay/Mastercard powered Zeta Super Card or via Zeta Super Tag and Zeta Super ID in their office cafeterias. Employees can also spend their meal vouchers while ordering their food online via the Zeta app.

A big advantage of Zeta’s Digitised Meal Vouchers is that the corporates can easily customise how employees can use them. They can even customize to the level of choosing the desired time of when the vouchers can be accepted in an office premise. Zeta partnered with Sodexo in May 2017 to power their meal voucher platform and make it fully digital. The partnership will help Sodexo bring cutting-edge technology solutions developed by Zeta to its corporate clients.

In addition to this, Sodexo’s 3 million users will get access Zeta’s simple and user-friendly tech solutions to enjoy their meal benefits. Zeta’s digitised meal voucher solution is fully compliant as per the new norms stated by RBI and Income Tax rules. These vouchers provide users with an opportunity to save up to 30% in taxes while purchasing food and non-alcoholic beverages.

What is Zeta's Banking technology?

We have built a robust platform which helps banks expand their digital footprint and optimise their core banking systems. Along with this, we also integrate the Zeta Tax Benefits suite to their platform which they can offer to their corporate clients. While this helps us increase our user base, it also allows banks to improve their CASA and interchange revenue. Some of the solutions that we offer apart from the Tax Benefits suite are:

Zeta offers the following platform to Banks

• • • Corporate Product Suite

• • • • Offer corporates Zeta’s digital tax saving employee solutions such as our Fuel, Medical Reimbursements and so on
    • Card Management Solution
      • Automate issuance of cards to customers using the Zeta platform
      • Card issuance is managed by Zeta without dependence on multiple vendors
    • Customer Lifecycle Automation
      • KYC Management
      • Automating the card linkage process (currently done by the bank)
    • UPI and Bharat QR integration
    • Zeta has also partnered with 3 leading banks like - RBL Bank, IDFC Bank and Kotak Mahindra Bank to offer digital benefits to employees

What is the technology aspect of Zeta app?

Zeta products are built around the idea that spending and receiving money should be seamless for everyone. At the center of the idea is Zeta’s digital payments system that is intuitive and has some of the most stringent security standards ever built.  Earlier companies were processing bills manually which was a time- and labour-intensive process.

At Zeta, we have put in place technologies that can detect tampering and duplicates by extracting various features of images submitted by employees. This helps our backend operators to discard invalid bills in an instant and notify users accordingly.  Bills are thoroughly vetted before approvals are made. This prevents discrepancies and also discourages misconduct of any sort.

We use AWS and for compliance reasons, we have our own data centers as well. We use microservices architecture which is built on top out microservices framework, providing us with linear scalability. In terms of specific technologies, we use Java, Node.js, Postgres, Cassandra, ElasticSearch and Redis.

To conclude, with the use of Zeta app you can hit two targets with one arrow. You can save trees by using this paperless process along with saving taxes and ordering lunch at office cafeteria.