Hitachi Payment Services is in the process of deploying 30,000 soundbox machines to SBI Payments Services and is aiming to garner up to 50% market share of overall point-of-sale (PoS) machines in the next three years, CEO of Hitachi Payment Services’ digital business Anuj Khosla told Fe.

Hitachi Payment Services, backed by Japanese conglomerate Hitachi, is a partner in a joint venture with State Bank of India for SBI Payment Services, where it holds 26% equity stake and rest is with SBI.

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“Our soundbox can be customised at a merchant level. Our partner bank can charge VAS (value-added service) fees on a monthly basis from merchants for this customisation. We are deploying 30,000 soundboxes for SBI Payments,” the CEO said, adding that the company is also in talks with other large banks for deployment of customised soundboxes.

Currently, soundboxes only read out loud the completion of transactions, and the amount transferred. Khosla said soundboxes can also have a display wherein merchants can advertise certain products on sale, among other messages.

Further, Hitachi Payments is targeting to expand its market share in the PoS machines to 50% from 25% presently in the next three years.

The company has till date managed 2 million PoS machines for various banks, including SBI, Axis Bank, IndusInd Bank and fintechs like PayTm and BharatPe.

“Out of 7.4 million PoS machines in market, we manage 2 million right now. These PoS machines are deployed by SBI, PayTm, Axis Bank, IndusInd Bank and other banks.

“We aim to gain 45-50% market share in overall PoS machines in 3 years, right now we are at around 25%,” Khosla said.

Products in pipeline

Hitachi Payment Services currently offers a range of financial solutions to its clients, including major banks and other financial institutions. These include DCC, which stands for dynamic currency conversion, which helps foreign customers to pay their dues in their foreign currency in hotels.

Further, it provides large merchants like insurance companies and e-commerce companies with portable devices, and a device for police challans, among others.

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“The device that police uses has all the information like what offence causes what fines. Then we also integrated it with Alcoholmeter, wherein when a person blows into the meter, the camera on the device captures the person’s image, and the receipt that is printed has the offender’s photo, has reading and the payment details,” Khosla said.

“Very interesting use-case we did was for Railways. For example ticket collectors can now take challan or issue a ticket using YoNo merchant app.

“We started it with Konkan railways as a pilot and now they are expanding it at other places,”

he added.

Going ahead, the payment services company is developing products and platforms around Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), ONDC, embedded finance, banking as a service platforms, among others.

“The company will either build these platforms in-house or through its startup incubation program, where it will invest in certain start-ups at a very early stage and help them build some of these stacks at a larger scale.