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Connecting All Bank Accounts Into a Single Platform

Alejandro Pinzón - DRUO
CEO

STORY INLINE POST

Sofía Hanna By Sofía Hanna | Journalist and Industry Analyst - Tue, 03/28/2023 - 08:56

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Q: How does DRUO unlock new business opportunities for its users?

A: Traditional payment systems are built on a complex network of intermediaries that make money movement complex and expensive. Most of these systems operate only locally, allowing users to send money only within the same market unless they pay for expensive credit card processing or slow/costly wire transfers.

DRUO is a new payment network that enables companies to send and receive money directly between bank accounts. We do this by connecting directly with financial institutions and turning all bank accounts into a payment method. This means businesses can now charge and send money to their users at any time and for any amount, based on what they agreed with them. The system is available to businesses through an intuitive web portal, integrated with over 5,000 popular applications, and a suite or APIs that can connect with any third-party system.

Q:  What are the benefits of turning bank accounts into payment methods for companies and SMEs?

A: There are three benefits that I would like to highlight around coverage, cost efficiency and security.

First, businesses can reach a broader user base since the system enables making transactions with any bank account in the Mexican market — no need to open new financial products, including credit cards. With 6 billion bank accounts worldwide (versus 3 million credit/debit cards), bringing all of those accounts into the DRUO ecosystem will facilitate money movement and unlock business opportunities that did not exist before.  

Second, we remove the complex network of intermediaries participating in traditional card transactions, which can sometimes add up to 12 intermediaries per transaction. This makes the process faster and generates substantial savings in the payment of processing fees.

Finally, money movement becomes safer. Our payments ecosystem connects directly with financial institutions, companies and users, so we are able to implement better fraud mitigation strategies with full visibility on who is doing what. This has resulted in a 0% fraud rate since we started our operations, with more than 32,000 users to date.

Q: How has the company eliminated intermediaries?

A: Moving money between accounts seems like a straightforward approach, however, simplicity is very hard to achieve. Over a dozen intermediaries participate in a single transaction in the current financial system, and we are starting to see a trend where even more intermediaries are being added to the transaction flow.

In the interest of making money movement faster and cheaper, we built a system that goes back to the basics: the source of funds. This is why we connect directly with banks and transmit instructions directly to them. The result is no intermediaries and faster money movement at a substantially lower cost.

Q: How does DRUO’s tool connect directly with financial institutions and what are the main benefits it provides to its users?

A: We have a money transfer layer, through which we connect with financial institutions to transfer funds efficiently. On top of that we offer a service layer that makes it easy for merchants to access the transfers. We have over 5,000 popular applications connected to our system via a partner, so companies can fully automate their businesses processes with just a couple of clicks. Ready-to-use integrations include CRM systems, accounting systems and even popular applications like Google Sheets, HubSpot, Slack and WhatsApp. These integrations allow for  fully automatic transaction processing and reconciliation without the need for further integration. Finally, our application programming interface (API) allows technologically-savvy companies to integrate their system directly with us to create fully automated customer journeys. 

This is very different to what traditional payment systems offer, where companies had to adapt to complex (and outdated) systems that took months — and even years — to connect to. Our system offers multiple options to adapt to the tools that companies already use.

Q: How would you describe DRUO’s target market?

A: Our target market is mid-market and enterprise companies. Our ideal customers have more than 20 employees and look for us to resolve very complex treasury, collections and disbursement use-cases. These customers are coming from all sectors, including financial services, education, supply chain and even renewable energies.

Q: What are DRUO’s plans for this year in Mexico?

A: We are finalizing our setup in Mexico at the moment, and will shortly announce our services for the country. Soon, Mexican businesses will be able to collect payments from any bank account within Mexico, as well as Colombia and Peru. Other markets, including the US will be made available by mid-2023. The possibilities that we are enabling for our customers with our solution are game-changing.

 

DRUO is a direct-to-account payment network that allows users to make and receive payments quickly, securely and at a lower cost.

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