Sowing seeds of success

While speaking recently to an entrepreneur who was thrilled after raising seed funding, I pondered over the humble word “seed,”. It has now become a metaphor for the initial thrust needed to scale any activity. In a real context, this tiny seed has always ensured we have food on our plates every single day; And our client Hytech Seed India Pvt. Ltd. has been right in the thick of action for more than two decades.

Fuelling growth

It all started in 2005, when Dr. Suri Sehgal realized that low quality seeds were impacting yield and farmers’ income. Through intense dedication, efforts to maximise impact over RoI, and a focus on technology, Hytech Seed started producing high-quality, high-yielding, and disease-tolerant hybrid seeds. The key mission of Hytech Seed is to boost farmers’ income, and bring a positive difference to Indian agrarian economy. The numbers speak volumes of their efforts over an eighteen-year journey . . .

Hytech Seed delivers more than 10,000 metric tons of seeds across the kharif and rabi sowing seasons every year. In addition, Hytech Seed is committed to work that also uplifts the lives of women farmers through its CSR initiatives, because they know that empowering women means empowering communities.

Truly inspiring results can be seen at the ground level.

Virtual account, real impact

Farmers access Hytech Seed products through a network of distributors. Collections are typically spread across three milestones

• 40 percent on advance
• 40 percent on dispatch
• 20 percent over the next four months.

Nuances such as discounts and adjustments are typical as well.

Hytech Seed had a history of tracking these collections and reconciling them manually with outstanding amounts per distributor. As volumes and the number of distributors grew, this manual activity became increasingly untenable, and the firm sought a digital solution with HSBC India.

HSBC setup a virtual account solution for Hytech Seed, assigning each of the 1000 distributors a unique virtual account number. Collections from each distributor were recorded automatically in separate virtual accounts, and reconciled with individual distributor’s outstanding—all in real time. This has helped Hytech gain a far-greater visibility of funds status from all distributors; and in turn resulted in a massive reduction of manual effort. The finance team is now able to focus on more value-added work.

In addition, Hytech Seed enjoys multiple facilities from HSBC on their road to the next level:

• All global and domestic accounts are in one place in HSBC’s award-winning internet banking platform HSBCNet.
• All export-related requirements taken care of, thanks to HSBC’s global trade solutions.
• Dedicated support is available at all times.

Mr. Sarma, head of Finance at Hytech, says “Tracking collections from our distributors was chocking our bandwidth, and not in line with our growth plans. HSBC stepped in and things have become extremely smooth for us. Technology plus great support sets them apart. This is just the beginning; we look forward to working with HSBC as we continue to digitize our end-to-end operations.”

Prakash Jaiswal, MD, and Country head of Business Banking (MSME and startups), says, “We at HSBC have always taken a customer-centric approach rather than a product-centric one. Our client Hytech is positively impacting all our lives, and we are pleased to have played a small role in their success. We look forward to continue to leverage our strengths to help them scale up.”

HSBC brings forth an entire suite of global solutions, and works extensively with clients to automate end-to-end processes involving multiple systems, and seamlessly manage all kinds of transactions with external parties. If you are looking for a partner to help streamline your operations coupled with best in class banking facilities, we would be happy to discuss synergies with you.

Let’s sow the seeds of success together!

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(With inputs from Prashanth Kamath from Hytech’s relationship team, Shekhar Lele, Business Innovation lead, Devesh Solanki, implementation manager, HSBC India)