MyCharity (Give It Back)

Due to industrialization and progress in service sector there is significant increase in a well settled middle class population in India. A large chunk of this well settled middle class and upper class shows great response to social issues and willingness to give some part of their earnings back to the society. Some of them want to participate in social activities whereas some of them just want to support in form of economical help. Increased work hours and family responsibilities is some of main reason behind only economical help.
This group needs easiest way to donate money for charity. However this group is also choosy enough to spend money for right cause and for right people.

1. Give it back: People understand their social responsibility and want to help needy and poor. They want to give back some part of their hard earnings.
   Issues: Its difficult to identify valid schemes or needy people whom people can help. Also there isn't common platform where both the donor, donee, trusts, research institutes can come together.
2. Tax deduction: Contribution made towards certain relief funds, charitable trusts and research institutes can be claimed as a deduction in income tax under section 80g and 80gga or other similar section. Some people want to use benefit of both: tax saving through charity.
   Issues: There is lack of knowledge of such relief fund, and trusts. Understanding income tax rule and which relief fund/trust comes under which kind of section is difficult. Also for some trusts need to physically visit the respective office to donate money and collect receipts.
3. Crowd funding: Today, WhatsApp is a nice and quickest way of communication. This also good source of information. We keep receiving messages about the needy people to fund small amount which help them for operation, to attend some tournament, sport practice, cancer treatment and many such things.
   Issues: It's very difficult to verify such information. We keep forwarding messages for months or years. Also there is no trusted way to identify source of information.

Today I am going to present product idea to address above issues.
There should be a portal where user should get all information related to various relief funds, trusts, research institutes, etc. Portal should allow to make direct online fund transfer using UPI based payment platform and other online means as well to make payment and should provide valid downloadable receipts. Below are the details for the features portal should provide:

1. Income tax saving: There should be completely separate section for tax saving funds/schemes. All the details pertaining to the income tax rules, institutes qualify under such rules, or even a calculator should be provided by the portal to calculate income tax saving.
2. Receipts: User should be able to download the receipts for donations that he has done through the portal. The receipts should also be provided for income tax saving schemes by making necessary tie-ups with government or respective organizations.
3. Verification mark: Portal should provide details of all such funds, organizations, or needy people. There should be a verification mark on such scheme clearly indicating that this is valid scheme and verified by the portal administrator.
4. Amount donated: For each scheme the amount donated till date and actual required amount (for crowd funding) should be clearly indicated. So that people will know how much amount is still required for a particular item can avoid over paying.
5. Request for crowd funding: Portal should allow users add request for crowd funding. Once administrator read the description he can decide to accept /reject request. Once request is accepted it should be visible for other users for donation. Just accepting a request will be not be marked as verified as mentioned above. There should be deep investigation to mark any scheme as verified.

What do you think about this? Do you have any other easy way or any suggestion? Let me know your views, thoughts on the same or IM me if you want to discuss further.

Payment platform

I started following news and portal of UPI (Unified Payment Gateway) even before its launch. What attracted me towards this is: First the idea behind it is incredible and in line to my goal of a product to 'make life easier of the users'. Second, there is enormous scope of e-transaction in India. Considering our population and coming digital era more-and-more e-transaction will happen. Also, government should promote more e-transaction to avoid black money. Going forward enormous amount of e-transaction will takes place. And the system based on UPI or similar will make life a lot easier of the consumer.

In this segment there are already players who are really doing very good. However, as mentioned above still large chunk of population is not part of digital systems. There is scope to develop an application which is simple to use simple to get integrated.

Here I am proposing to have a payment system based on UPI which should be simple to use and it should act as an platform to get integrated with other e-commerce systems. The platform may or may not be directly seen by the end user. It should be completely cloud base solution. i.e. it should be completely API-led solution.

The platform should facilitate to register the users, authenticate and authorize the use and make e-transaction for the use. All this should transparent to the end user. I mean we should provide a platform which may not directly seen by the end user. This platform should be flexible enough to get integrated with any consumer centric app which needs e-transaction.

This app should make use of barcode as much as possible. It should use barcodes for:
1. Authentication of payee, payers
2. Verification if any
3. Amount chargeable, public links
4. Transaction summary, receipt

Ease of use/integrate, highly responsive, fault-tolerant and 2-d barcode centric will make this app useful and stand out in the already crowded marked.

Let me know your views, thoughts on the same or IM me if you want to discuss further.