Digital payments for small merchants: Digital payments acceptance platform for merchants Pine Labs, on Monday, announced the launch of its QR and card acceptance device Mini focusing on SME merchants. According to the company, the device is “expected to be available at nearly one-third of the cost of the regular Point of Sale (POS) terminal.”
Pine Labs provides merchants with payment solutions for their omnichannel requirements, operating in India and Southeast Asia. In a release, Pine Labs said that while most existing PoS devices in India are tailored for debit/credit card customers, the Mini device is a “QR-first and card tap contactless payments device”.
Navnit Nakra, CRO, Pine Labs, said, “QR-based and card tap payments are a perfect solution for Indian consumers on the go. On the merchant side, an absolute must is a fast checkout experience and the elimination of the cost barrier in point-of-sale digitisation. Addressing these needs, we are delighted to launch a QR-first, card-accepting, cost-effective PoS solution called Pine Labs Mini.”
Also read: Plan to cater to SMEs, says Pine Labs’ Online and Omnichannel Business Head
The company offers digital payments software Plural for businesses to collect online payments, make payouts, onboard customers and offer embedded finance solutions through a dashboard and APIs for integration.
Importantly, to boost digital payment adoption among merchants, the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), which operates retail payments and settlement systems in the country, in March this year had joined hands with various payment aggregators to enable merchant transactions through RuPay credit cards on UPI. Earlier, UPI customers were able to make transactions only through their bank accounts, overdraft accounts, and prepaid accounts.
Moreover, this year, the government is also expected to launch a merchant credit card (MCC) for MSMEs to address their short-term liquidity challenges, FE had reported earlier this year.
According to BCG and Matrix Partners India report in August last year, the next wave of disruption in India’s payment landscape is expected to come from the rapid explosion of digital merchant payments, as 75 per cent merchants were covered via QR, and through greater penetration and UPI enablement of credit cards.
Meanwhile, mobile commerce and payments company Paytm had reported 6.8 million merchants subscribed for the company’s payment devices such as Soundbox and POS machines as of March 2023, more than doubling from 2.9 million as of March 2022.