At the juxtaposition of the past and the future — celebrating 75 glorious years of Independence on August 15, 2022 and mapping out the path to a developed nation in 25 years — India’s economic landscape has assimilated in the foundation of the world’s two most critical aspects: technology and environment. When Prime Minister Narendra Modi fostered the journey of the country to its Amrit Kaal, the 100th year of being a developed one, he had already embarked on India being the digital leader globally that was committed towards fulfilling its United Nations charter of environmental responsibilities much ahead of the timelines.
Economic development and financial empowerment, a strong transition from India’s requirement for financial inclusion, are the key drivers of this “developed nation in 25 years” clarion call and the requisite path to nation building.
Hitachi India has for long placed itself at the forefront of driving nation-building through financial empowerment, a step up from financial inclusion, through Hitachi Payment Services Pvt. Ltd., a Hitachi Group Company. Its offerings articulate effectively and complement Hitachi’s global and regional business strategy unified with the Government of India’s roadmap for the economy taking India@75 to India@100 built on four key pillars of development: inclusive development, productivity enhancement, energy transition, and climate action.
As per Mr. Bharat Kaushal, Managing Director, Hitachi India, Hitachi is driving the nation’s financial empowerment, and thus a robust nation of the future. “At Hitachi, our proposition is about driving a robust, digitally savvy payments enterprise through Social Innovation Business, especially reflecting the buoyancy of Hitachi’s global evolution through the amalgamation of three core pillars — Green Technology, Digital Technology, and Innovation. This is also in conjunction and the synergy that Hitachi Payments is driving in making India one of the world leaders, financially thus hustling on Prime Minister Modi’s vision of making the country a developed nation in the coming decades.”
Driving Digital Payment Innovation
In India, the past one decade has seen the digital payments space grow remarkably with the introduction of a wide array of payment modes, favourable government policies and a wide scale customer adoption. Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana (National Mission on Financial Inclusion) and Direct Benefit Transfer flow with mobile and Aadhaar linkages, adoption of social security/pension schemes, facilitating credit flows and promoting digital payments using Rupay cards, BHIM app and UPI have had a stupendous success and a visionary fulfilment of digital-India.
Hitachi Payment Services, a significant player in the payments space, has been offering a comprehensive suite of cash and digital payment solutions backed by state-of-the-art technology platform, end-to-end services, and a nationwide network. And these are particularly manifesting through solutions such as SoftPOS, value-added services such as Dynamic Currency Conversion and EMI, Merchant Platform, Cash Recycling Machines (CRMs) and Micro ATM among others, enabling a new era of payments
Says Mr. Rustom Irani, Managing Director – Hitachi Payment Services,
“Hitachi Payments is further strengthening the payment infrastructure in the country through its innovative solutions, enabling easy access to cash and digital payments for the masses. With a strong focus on security and reliability, our innovations drive business efficiency and reduce costs while transforming the payment experience for customers and merchants. By leveraging our social innovation business philosophy, technology expertise and customer centric approach, we are contributing towards building a robust payment infrastructure while supporting the evolution of society and achieving sustainable economic growth”
Fostering continuous innovation in an evolving payment landscape, Hitachi Payments empowers banks and payment aggregators with end-to-end solutions for all digital payment needs. Its next-gen merchant platform is a secure and easy to use solution for merchants, offering a range of facilities including digital onboarding, innovative payments, and value-added services. The SoftPOS solution allows merchants to accept payments via their smartphones, thus enabling banks and payment aggregators to rollout digital payment services to merchants faster and in a cost-effective manner. While value added services such as Dynamic Currency Conversion (DCC), Brand EMI, Bank EMI and BNPL help drive new business opportunities, build differentiation, and enhance customer experience.
With over 1.98 Mn POS devices under management, Hitachi offers a strong cross-sell platform for banks, facilitating a wider reach for their financial products while its Payment Gateway solution powers online payments for some of the top payment aggregators in the country. Digitalization of toll & transit payments is a big step towards realizing the digital-India vision and this is where Hitachi Payments’ robust tech backbone and expertise in payments domain have helped achieve it. For public transport systems such as metros, buses as well as parking it offers innovative digital payment solutions.
Cashing in on cash
In the banking sector, Hitachi has made an indelible mark in advancement and inclusive growth. The government’s efforts to ensure financial sustainability resulted in the advent of smaller financial institutions cementing their presence along with multi-varied cash dispensing platforms being set up in the rural sector, shifting from conventional ATMs to CRMs and setting up White Label ATMs (WLAs).
Hitachi’s advanced CRMs are designed to support the digital-India initiatives through the display of QR code for card-less cash withdrawal, soft-keyboard for data entry of UPI transactions and Aadhaar-enabled biometric functionality. From customer onboarding to servicing, its end-to-end Digital Banking Unit (DBU) outsourcing services enable banks to offer top-of-the-line services in line with changing customer expectations.
Value-adding in Social Innovation
WLAs operating largely in remote geographies, serve as a banking touch point and have contributed to greater financial empowerment. Under the brand “Hitachi Money Spot ATM”, Hitachi has deployed over 8,600 WLAs in the country, providing the semi-urban and rural populace access to much needed banking services, thus enhancing their quality of life. It has emerged as the ONLY operator among WLAs that offer cash deposits. In addition, the Micro ATM solution enables a host of banking services at the customers’ doorsteps. These include services such as cash withdrawal, cash deposit, bill payments, money transfer, account opening and more. It is the cash recycling leader in India with over 28,000 CRMs. Currently it manages over 74,000 ATMs (including CRMs & WLAs) across the country.
Shaping India sustainably
India’s payment landscape has undergone a paradigm shift over the past decade. In this, Hitachi Payments has not only consistently played the pivotal role in revolutionising this space, but also ensured that the technology it has deployed, the solutions it has created, and the audience it has catered to have all had an environmental impact positively to foster a sustainable world around us. Technologies have unified services and reduction of cash-in-circulation through effective use of Cash Recycling Machines have reduced carbon footprint in large scales, digitalised processes and services such as converting POS receipts to e-charge slips and unclogging toll plazas with efficient collection systems that help cut down on fuel consumption. Businesses that would have taken weeks to start can now take off in a much shorter time, thanks to Hitachi Payments and its robust infrastructure, thus helping build carbon credits.
Overall, Green Tech and Digital Tech have been embedded in the Hitachi DNA that aims to provide a socially enabled citizen-centric nation and the wherewithal to usher in a future that is healthy, wealthy and sustainable.
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