By Manish Patel, Founder and CEO, Mswipe said : The Indian fintech ecosystem has seen visible changes for quite some time now. While it was demonetisation in 2016 that had sparked the initial take-off of digital payments in India, government’s efforts over a period of time have kept the momentum going. The global pandemic however has fuelled tremendous and large scale adoption of digital payments and digital commerce in India – right from metros to even tier 4/5 cities.
The Government has always encouraged digital payments, and it has certainly helped the Fintech industry. According to the RBI report in September 2020, POS terminals from banks alone have gone up to 5.1 Million from 3.6 million in January 2019. The pandemic has certainly boosted prospects for fintech players and helped us acquire new customers.
At Mswipe, contactless payments have grown from 13% of total transactions in January 2020 to 30% of total transactions in December 2020. RBI’s recent move of increasing the limit to Rs.5,000 will unlock the true potential of contactless payments and allow SMEs to accept digital payments for larger ticket size transactions. Be it a monthly kirana bill, spa service or a course fee, the spectrum of products and service that can be paid through contactless payments will expand with this new move.
We introduced Pay by link – online link-based payments to help merchants offer contactless payments to customers even if they were remote. Businesses which earlier were offline, have now started accepting online payments enabled by Mswipe’s Paybylink. We also launched Bank Box, an affordable digital acceptance and payment solution designed to meet the cost-centric needs of the SMEs eliminating the cost of ownership of the POS terminal. To increase affordability in offline purchases, we came up with buy now pay later solution enabling merchants to offer EMI in less than 15 secs giving greater choice and flexibility to their customers.
In 2021, Mswipe believes that cash-flow based lending for small merchants will gain traction since there is need for a more dynamic system to support SMEs with short term credit requirements than depend upon static models like determining their credit worthiness through bank statements. Great technology adoption and higher preference to offer Buy Now Pay Later offering to their customers will definitely draw more interest from SMEs.
