ClearTax’s success mantra--grow through acquisition

A: It directly augments our existing business with good quality customers and experienced employees, besides strengthening our presence in Hyderabad market. ClearTax has been building an industry leading e-invoicing solution that will be rolled out to businesses when the e-invoicing framework goes live. We look forward to providing it to the newer customers we are acquiring through Karvy.

Q: Won’t this acquisition create brand confusion since Karvy too has a pool of 200 enterprise customers?

A: We have over 1500 enterprises as well as 60,000 CA and tax practitioners using our products. Our retention rates are quite high, as a result of building products with a keen ear to customer needs and in-house capabilities to turn insights into a strong product proposition.

We have communicated clearly to our customers about the acquisition and there doesn’t seem to be any confusion. Karvy Data Management had other business interests as well, and we took over just the GST business. Karvy will continue its other services-based business models.

Q: How is ClearTax creating solutions to resolve accounting, analytics, and governance problems for its enterprise and MSME clients as well as first-time investors?

A: We are building solutions across all these areas, while deepening our offerings across individuals, SMEs and enterprises. In this journey we will continue to look at all adjacent opportunities that can augment our capabilities or consolidate the market. Our product portfolio is widening, and we are looking at adding quality engineers and product managers across all of our verticals.

Q: Since the industry is moving towards a mobile-first ecosystem, how is ClearTax working towards this?

A: We have teams that ensure that technology, taxation, legal and customer needs are kept in mind while designing products. We innovate and improve upon our solutions to ensure that customers find it easy to stay compliant.

We have also embarked on our mobile journey with the DoseFM acquisition a few months back. We already released out our SME-facing app ‘Clear’ and have seen strong traction within few weeks.

Q: SMEs finds tax compliance a big challenge. How is ClearTax tapping this opportunity?

A: India is evolving fast, and the government expects all segments of the market to be compliant and not just the top companies. And yes, SMEs find it difficult to stay compliant.

We ensure that our solutions are packaged appropriately for smaller companies. We are simplifying workflows and form factors for smaller companies e.g., for filing ‘nil return’ within 30 seconds. Our familiarity with India’s business ecosystem means that we are able to design products keeping in mind the whole suite of products that an SME might use.