Aavishkar 2021 – Tech Week Part 1

Aavishkar, the first ever technology week at Qwikcilver took place in the last week of February. i.e., 22nd February 2021 to 26th February 2021. It was a one-of-a-kind program for learning and sharing amazing technology related projects that our teams are working on. It included discussions by industry experts and insights from our valuable customers, showcasing cutting edge technology concepts and innovations, market trends & analysis and some fun contests and games too.
Sanjay Tambwekar, CTO, Qwikcilver, kick started the virtual event by taking us back to the invention of internet networking and its step-by-step advancement of technology that we see today. In his words “We saw the world respond to an unprecedented pandemic. While the response was decentralized, it was still swift and collaborative. We saw terrific advances in genome mapping, the search for a new vaccine, data analytics to support decisions management of logistics, and many more. The highlight of this was the adoption of digital technologies which happened, more swiftly than ever before. Digital payment and FinTech is one such area where the move to digital is not irreversible. We have to give everyone a bit of perspective of that landscape, the ecosystem, the competition, and the emerging solutions.”
Aavishkar intends to address a better understanding of the offerings that Qwikcilver and Pine Labs have and will help us appreciate the synergies & value we bring to our customers. The key take away was that we as a pioneer of gift card technology have to keep reinventing ourselves as we build new solutions.

Day 1

As we continue to strengthen our position in existing markets and venture into new markets, it is imperative that we continuously scan the competitive landscape and design our strategy accordingly. Prabhat N Ramesh, Product Management Manager, Qwikcilver, presented a high-level overview of our competitors around our core business across various regions. Corporate distribution drives about 80% of gift card volume in India and about 20 % comes from retail distribution, while in USA it is the other way around. Latest industry statistics say India is to grow about CAGR of 32.6% over 2020-2024. we are likely to be USD 3.5 Billion market by 2024.
Chandan Kumar & Viqar Naqvi,from Pine Labs explained the Aggregator model of Pine Labs. Aggregator model helps Pine labs instantly onboard a merchant on its platforms by taking care of their TID /MID generation payouts. This model has reduced the onboarding process from 14 days to 2 days. Helping merchants to avoid going through hassles from the banks, it provides a single window for all services like funds settlements, business loan, POS maintenance. All the payouts are settled instantly or in a T+1 basis. All the offerings from Pine Labs are now aggregator model based.
Mohanram D, Senior Software Engineer, Woohoo Engineering team, Qwikcilver, gave a quick demo on QwikServ product of Qwikcilver. QwikServ is a bulk ordering tool where users can buy gift cards in a bulk and send them to different end customers in a single order.
Ravishankara Beedige,Director SV Engineering, Qwikcilver, who heads the architecture team, spoke about the newly developed extension framework, which is a way of adding more functionality to our core work. Customization is the key. Catering to customer needs leads to new innovations and has enormous possibilities. As per requirements by different customers we need to develop solutions without hampering the existing solutions. This can be done by developing a customization extension set to the existing solution to ease its functionality. Extension framework has been able to address the issues of the airline industry currently and is in continuous growth process. Qwikcilver is planning to make its products more user friendly by adding extension frameworks to activities which can be customized. “Real luxury is customization” – Lapo Elkann.
Performance scale and resiliency are few important aspects of non-functional requirements, companies have started to invest in strengthening the non-functional aspects of products and services. Narayan Kulkarni, Senior Principal Engineer, Qwikcilver, discussed the 3 major trends of performance engineering in the industry.
1.How do we left shift in performance?
Optimize all the stages of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). This can be achieved by aligning Performance engineering life cycle (PELC) along with SDLC at every stage.
2.The right shift – The shift can be done by leveraging artificial intelligence, machine learning, data analytics to tune to the performance testing. Being aware of the new technology, study the history data and adapt the technology which is critical to the performance.
3.Ensuring resiliency through performance – Based on the scale we have today, Resiliency is one important feature that has to be taken into consideration. It can happen at the software and hardware angle. To achieve resilience: error handling, idempotency, abstraction, retry mechanism, throttles, outrages have to be optimized to its best.
Raj Chaitanya, Service Delivery Automation Manager, Qwikcilver, gave insights on GiftSmiles merchant program configuration automation and helpdesk transactional tickets automation. The aim was to eliminate human intervention for the merchant onboarding process for GiftSmiles program. Through automation of the process, onboarding process time was reduced from 3-4 business days to 3-4 hrs. Challenges and opportunities of this program and how Qwikcilver have designed the entire process for smooth functioning was explained in detail.
Helpdesk does numerous various activities, and it differs from use case to use case. The aim was to bring in efficiency of the whole system. Currently, all the activities were done manually. The approach to reduce manual intervention was to reduce the number of steps that helpdesk technician is currently performing and automate the repetitive steps “Qwik Wrapper Application” was created to address all the issues.
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