Lyra Network: Innovative Solutions Powering the Fintech Space

Rajesh Desai | CEO & MD | Lyra India
Rajesh Desai | CEO & MD | Lyra India

Technology has transformed the necessary elements of our daily lives over the last couple of decades and that is certainly the case where making payments is concerned. It was not a while ago that debit and credits cards were used widely for transactions and viewed as the ‘next massive thing’ in the financial space, but things have moved on with developments significantly since then.

There is now a plethora of ways to pay for our essential requirements and services digitally, some of which are proving better than primary money transfer methods. The use of digital wallets, and integrated money transfer applications is on the rise.

The government policies to promote cashless transactions brought an immense thrust to develop and offer seamless and convenient digital payment solutions. Fintech companies and their reliable payment management tools are powering these developments by creating effective payment gateway services. This is where the Lyra network comes into the picture.

Lyra network has been providing quality services concerning digital payment solutions and is actively working in the sectors like Payment Gateway Services. The company aims to build innovative and secure solutions to facilitate online payments for leading industries.

In an exclusive interview with Insights Success, Mr Rajesh Desai, CEO and MD, Lyra India sheds light on the company’s journey, the current industrial scenario, and his opinions on the future of the company.

Mr Rajesh, please describe our audience about Lyra Network in detail.

Lyra network offers payment solutions and services for banks, financial institutes, and e-commerce platforms. The journey began in Toulouse, Paris in the year 2001 when Mr Alain Lacour founded Lyra Network intending to revolutionize the payment world with innovations and modern technologies.

With his expertise in the payment domain and techno professional background, Lyra Network quickly expand holistically in the Europe Market and crossed the borders (with 10+ subsidiaries across the world) to support international clients.

Lyra Network started its operations in India in 2007 under my leadership (Mr Rajesh Desai, CEO and MD of Lyra Network India) along with Mr Christophe Mariette who is the Chairman of the Company.

After 14 successful years, Lyra Network India is now one of the most preferred partners for financial establishments; thanks to Lyra’s in-depth knowledge of market expectations, technical expertise, and the quality of customer care.

Today, Lyra is an established leader in securing and managing payments, offering innovative payment management tools with a highly secure environment to deliver payments worldwide for banks, financial institutes, merchants, and transport sectors.

What inspired you to indulge professionally in the fintech space?

I live by the motto, ‘Today I want to be a better person than yesterday’, so considering the evident signs that India will go under massive digital transformations and the notable talent pool India possesses, I thought why not broaden my motto beyond that and make, ‘become better than yesterday!’ India always welcomes modern technologies with an open mind.

The same applied to digital payments, with more people opting for digital options, penetration of mobile devices, and increased usage of various digital payment solutions like debit, credit, prepaid, e-purse, ATM, POS cards and it felt that why not try to offer a better and safer environment to boost the digital advancement.

Keeping this in mind, I entered fintech via the Lyra Network field and the rest is history!

What kind of offerings does Lyra Network provide to its clients?

Lyra network has been providing quality services concerning digital payment solutions. Lyra is actively working in the sectors like Payment Gateway Services, Banking Solutions, White Label Solutions, and offers highly secure payment acceptance solutions like Lyra EPOS, SIM Solution, POS Routing Solution, Payment Switch, WhatsApp Payment Solution, and many more add-on innovative services in the payment processing field.

Lyra’s vision is to build and offer relevant, dependable, and secure solutions to facilitate online payments. Lyra takes pride in stating that the venture was the very first under the Fintech industry banner in India to introduce secure connections with an intelligent platform for Point of Sales (POS) terminals with 2G/3G/4G and PSTN technology which proved to be a major disruptor in the use of POS in India.

What were the hurdles you and Lyra Network had to surmount in the fintech and digital payment space?

When I returned to India, it was not easy for me to leave behind my comfort zone and to proceed further without any idea of what lay in store for my professional growth. Lyra started its journey in India with a one-man army from absolute zero and within a few months, a seasoned professional advised that the company would not exist in India for more than a year.

But stepping out of a comfort zone and taking the negative comments as a challenge made it clear that anything is possible with perseverance. What we struggle for today, becomes our strength for tomorrow.

Over the period, the challenges under the guise of technology crept in. For a payment solution provider, it is extremely necessary to keep pace with changing innovations. Lyra faced the formidable challenge of sourcing the right field experts at the right time for the right designations.

However, Lyra overcame this challenge slowly and surely. Today, what once was a one-man army with a shared cornered office stands with multiple office spaces and a large family of field expert individuals.

Another challenge was to keep up the pace with ever-changing customer requirements and offer a flexible solution that can withstand the trials of time.

It was challenging to offer dynamic solutions with the highest possible support, but Lyra invested a great amount of time and effort to strengthen its infrastructure and as a result, Lyra has its two full-fledged robust active data centres at Mumbai, and Bengaluru capable of managing a disaster recovery situation at any time.

How was Lyra Network affected during the COVID-19 pandemic and how did you manage to curb the damages all the while helping your clients and maintaining the safety of your employees?

Lyra works with responsibility-driven behaviour. We know we have a social responsibility and with every opportunity, we get we are trying to help in any way to make a change. The pandemic has caused seismic changes all over the world with an unforeseeable future. But despite this unfortunate event, Lyra’s services continued to provide customers with the much-needed transaction-related services without fail.

In addition to bearing the vaccination cost for every employee, Lyra welcomed work from home policy and managed to keep an undisturbed working track. Lyra is always keen on offering highly scalable infrastructure and this robustness enabled all the services to be fully available for people and the government to move funds.

During the lockdown, Lyra’s last-mile connectivity solution helped the government make cash disbursements to rural India. Lyra has contributed to CM, and PM relief funds, and most recently, played an active role in contributing ration kits for the needy in the rural areas in the fight against COVID-19.

Being an eminent leader, what would you like to advise the aspirants who want to make a mark in the fintech space?

My advice to the aspirants is ‘Perseverance and intelligence are your allies;’ the Indian fintech industry is gaining momentum year by year and there is a never-ending demand for a specific skill set and field experts.

In addition to technical and financial skills you had to have a robust portfolio of soft skills and you must be up to date with innovative technologies, trends, and market expectations. Every fintech solution has its own unique infrastructure so being adaptable and agile can be remarkably effective.

You must be open-minded and not be tied down with the traditional practices as sometimes non-traditional practices can deliver better and optimized results. Today there are many resources to help you out. To become successful, you must struggle, and the most important thing is to believe in what you do with passion.

Where do you envision Lyra Network eventually and what are your goals in the future? How do you plan to embrace the changes happening in the fintech industry?

Lyra will continue to play a leading role in achieving India’s dream of becoming a 5 trillion economy and a no cash society. With every step forward, Lyra is making sure to offer seamless and convenient digital payment solutions. With this new year, Lyra will do its best to maintain the perseverance with the strategies that have helped the company grow so far.

Being one of the leading payment solutions in India, Lyra envisions expanding its presence by providing multiple offerings in the dynamic payment domain. We are expecting to see the expansion of not only offerings in terms of resources, customer base, and partners but Lyra is also looking forward to expanding the Lyra family by incorporating field experts from various backgrounds.

What is the current industrial scenario of the fintech industry in India?

During the pandemic, the Indian fintech space has seen many defining moments and transformed consumer and merchants’ behaviour. The Indian payment system has seen robust growth clearly indicating growing confidence among consumers towards digital payments not only in tier 1 and 2 cities but also tier 3 and beyond.

New, as well as established financial institutes, realized the importance of innovation, technology, and their benefits. Indian fintech space is witnessing a transformation in terms of technological innovations, regulatory changes, and policies.

An Eminent Leader

Mr Rajesh Desai, CEO and MD, Lyra India made a life-transforming decision when he started his journey with Lyra Network. After working for many years in various countries and getting exposed to multiple markets, cultures, and traditions, Mr Rajesh Desai returned to his native country to make Lyra Network successful in India.

Associated with Lyra Network from Day one, since August 2007, over the years and many obstacles later, his great supervision and an unmatched persistence to reach goals helped Lyra pick up the pace to grow in India.

With 27+ years of experience and field expertise, he is a result-driven and value-oriented leader who specializes in developing marketing strategies, product marketing, alliance marketing, marketing communications, and demand generation.

He comes from a techno-functional background and has a proven record of building, nurturing, and leading high-performance goals along with improving service standards, contributing to cost optimization, and bringing innovation with extreme passion to register inorganic growth and profit.

 

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