Burning Platform: Strategic Insights on Zoho Finance & Operations Platform

For the 115th episode of Burning Platform, we host Sivaramakrishnan "Siva" Iswaran, who heads the Finance and Operations Suite at Zoho globally

At the recent ZohoDay24 event, I saw Siva present on Financial and Operational capabilities they have been investing in. Much of that was under NDA so I invited him to present below a shorter version. He showcases Zoho’s growing ambitions across several dimensions: localization for many fast growing countries, its growing ecosystem, expanding beyond its SME focus to the Enterprise Market and eCommerce, Payments and other financial services which are allowing them to branch into many verticals.

Zoho has been growing core accounting capabilities since 2011 when it introduced its Books product. Today in addition it has Expenses, Billing, integration with Contracts, Subscriptions, Inventory, Payroll,  Practice Management for services firms and other capabilities in its growing portfolio – see complete listing here He adds their platform allows for even more breadth by being customizable, extensible, automatable and increasingly AI-powered.

Starting at 11.44, he talks about their global footprint even as many other vendors are retrenching. He talks about eInvoicing in India, Saudi, Mexico, corporate tax support in UAE and other localizations.

At 15.30, he presents on the exploding ecosystem around Zoho – see image below

At 18.27 he talks about plans for the Enterprise Market and candidly acknowledges the very different approach they will need to deliver to a much larger scale, to the segment’s expectations of “solutions”, their comfort with a direct sales model etc.

I especially liked the section starting at 21.50 where he talks about global disruptions around financial services to include Payments, eCommerce and Credit. He highlights alternate payment “rails” like UPI maturing to challenge the Visa/Mastercard duopoly and their eye popping economics and about Zoho’s plans for a Unified Payment Solution. He discusses ONDC - Open Network for Digital Commerce - in India which is aimed to challenge proprietary eCommerce players and also include ride-share, food deliveries and other services.  He also discusses OCEN – Open Credit Enabled Network - which enables micro-loans and other lending markets.

Around 41.00 I ask him when the extremely ambitious vision will start to be publicly fleshed out.  As if that is not challenging enough, I also talk to him about opportunities in “servitization” in capital intensive sectors that are moving to long-term, outcome-based business models.  

Is Zoho biting off too much? As he discusses, they are used to low margins, they are adapting their SME focused digital channel to very different enterprise selling, and I have written plenty about their unique culture, their curiosity and willingness to continually experiment.  

As I tell him at the end, I look forward to hosting him every few months to get an update on many of these initiatives. It is already a fascinating conversation and future ones will be even more so as they share their product and market expansion.