Playing A Master Stroke: Bhavin Turakhia, Founder, Zeta

Serial entrepreneur and billionaire Bhavin Turakhia have in the last 22 years bootstrapped five successful businesses. He founded the digital payment platform Zeta in 2015, which offers a cloud-native neo-banking platform for the issuance of credit, debit and prepaid products that enable legacy banks and corporations to launch engaging retail and corporate products; and digitised solutions to enterprises such as employee tax benefits, automated cafeteria, employee gifting, R&R. Placing his name on the honourable list of BW Businessworld 40 under 40 is yet another achievement. 

With a total of $600 million in transactions performed annually, Zeta’s competitive advantage comes from building disruptive technology that brings convenience and productivity to the workplace. Turakhia said: “To keep the advantage tipped in our favour, we keep perfecting our innovations with the latest technology relevant to our users until it becomes a way of life.” Speaking on the uniqueness of Zeta, he added, “It is the only platform offering customizability and compliance, along with a number of payment modes to the end-user – all of which can be administered and managed from one powerful dashboard. 

Zeta has also been leveraging the latest technologies such as artificial intelligence to better its solutions and stay future-ready. Our claims process, for instance, uses machine intelligence and human feedback to improve machine intelligence learnings. Zeta has successfully forged partnerships with market leaders like Sodexo, RBL Bank, IDFC Bank, CnergyisInfotech, Kotak Mahindra Bank, ADP India, Excelity Global and Aon Hewitt, among others. The number of corporate clients has crossed 14,000. Zeta’s products like Employee Tax Benefits suite broke the status quo by re-imagining mundane activities that consume a lot of time and effort but added little value to a company’s bottom line. Automating mechanical processes allowed employees to enjoy convenience in everyday tasks and have more productive hours at their disposal - something that most companies seek out. 

Talking about the challenges Turakhia has faced in his journey, he said, “The biggest challenge I have faced is to attract and retain best talents in the country. I have spent a lot of my personal time in recruitment and to ensure that we have the best talent across all levels which becomes critical.” He informs that for an organisation to grow it’s important to have people who imbibe the right combination of skills and entrepreneurial drive. Turakhia stated, “I actively seek different perspectives from my teams. This helps in having an open and easy work environment. In my opinion, all this helps us in

maintaining a positive culture, which allows people to grow and also encourage our existing employees to recommend the best talent from their circles.” Unpacking the lessons he learnt in his journey he said, “Through my entrepreneurial journey, I’ve also learnt that it is not only about creating a successful company but also about keeping up personal and professional growth. I do this by building on my knowledge constantly -- that’s not just at work, but also outside of it. I strongly believe in understanding my surroundings and exploring opportunities to learn from situations and people around me.”

Zeta’s banking technology provides comprehensive multi-factor authentication solution for Mastercard, Visa and RuPay card transactions. It also has a feature-rich prepaid, debit and credit card issuance system. The platform also offers a one-stop solution for all commercial cards - travel cards, purchase cards, virtual cards, and forex cards.