Enabling cashless transactions for merchants

The traditional cash-operating model has become passé for most urban consumers in India. Today, it’s all about “swiping” your card and leaving the hassle of billing to machines.

In this regard, entrepreneur Manish Patel started the country’s first bank-independent merchant acquirer mobile POS Company, ‘Mswipe Technologies’, which enables merchants to accept diverse payment options. The Co-founder and CEOspeaks on the idea behind developing the technology and its applicability for both large and SME merchants.

Excerpts.

Tell us about yourself.
My entrepreneurial vision started with an aspiration to bring about a change, a disruption in the existing systems and a passion to pursue and drive business.

In January 2009, I started a few wine and beer retail stores in Mumbai and like every small merchant wanted to accept card payments from customers. Despite having other well-established businesses and long-standing relationships with banks, the terms set by them to provide POS terminals to small businesses were appalling. Moreover, the POS terminals offered by banks were not mobile despite a substantial portion of retail sales being home delivery of goods.

Addressing this industry challenge gave birth to the idea of a merchant acquiring business using mobile POS (MPOS). This was a key technology as there was a need for a better and more cost effective POS solution in the market place for small merchants, who ended up losing many of their sales as the customer would not have cash after the entire dealing is completed.

That’s what led to Mswpie?
Mswipe Technologies Pvt. Ltd was established so we bring to market a mobile phone based card acceptance, payment and settlement solution that could provide seamless and affordable POS solutions directly to every merchant, in any nick and corner of India whether it’s a corporation or partners like insurance agents or home delivery or small kirana stores.

We have a solution for all and aspire to focus on this core area of addressing the challenge for Small and Medium sized merchants. Our endeavour is to onboard about one million merchants by 2020 in India. Mswipe’s mission is to provide merchants with a low cost, easy to use and transparent payment solution that enables collection of electronic payment.

Our solution is used by SME merchants as well as corporates with large deployments. However our focus is squarely on the 15 million large SME base spread across tier 1/2/3 India that currently has very low penetration of electronic payments acceptance.

How much time did it take to develop it?
The solution was developed in the period mid-2011 to 2013. One of the big challenges faced by the team during this period was RBI’s mandate to the change regulations around second factor authentication. This required all POS terminals to accept Chip cards and accept entry of PIN.

During this period, we had already developed a swipe capable of accepting only magnetic stripe cards. Due to the regulation change, the team had to go back to the drawing board to develop an EMV device capable of PIN entry. In Jan 2014, we launched a fully compliant mPOS terminal capable of accepting chip cards with PIN entry as well as magnetic stripe cards.

As this deals with cash how do you secure the transactions?
Mswipe’s terminals follow regulations laid down by the RBI. We are also certified by PCI, MasterCard, Visa and AMEX. All transaction data is encrypted at the merchant’s end before being transmitted

Who all can use MSwipe?
A wide range of merchants in both the large enterprise as well as SME merchant category can use Mswipe.

We have integrated with large enterprise customers like Jet Airways for payment at the checkin counter, HDFC Life for payments for insurance premiums and Delivery fleet for Myntra.com.

For the SME merchants, Mswipe is the solution of choice as we offer the lowest cost solution to accept card payments, easy setup, merchants do not need to open a new account and can use the existing account of any bank and transparent charges that the merchant can understand.

By NavinPivhal