Move designed to address key bottleneck to card acceptance by smaller retailers
- Innoviti Technologies Ltd. announced the market launch of “Innoviti-POS” – targeted at enabling rapid scale-up of digital payment acceptance through POS amongst smaller retailers in Tier-2 and Tier-3 towns across India.
- Typically, small town retailers who are new to digital payments see little or no benefit in going digital for their payment acceptance. They perceive an unwanted increase in their cost of business as digital payments are charged processing costs unlike cash. Further, accepting cash in hand helps them to easily make payments to their own suppliers coming for daily collections, a flexibility they fear will be lost since digital payment settlements are typically not credited the very same day.
- Innoviti-POS has a unique feature that transfers funds for settlement of digital transactions to the merchant’s account, on the very same day that those transactions are made. Moreover, this same day transfer is guaranteed every single day, i.e. all 365 days of the year irrespective of any weekend, public or Bank holidays. Since cash collecting merchants cannot deposit their daily cash proceeds into banks on bank holidays, they are not able to use it to reduce the interest against overdrafts they may have taken. By enabling 365-day same day fund transfer, Innoviti-POS allows them to save considerably on their business overdraft interest cost. For a merchant with an overdraft of Rs. 100,000, the merchant can save up to Rs. 10,000 per year through Innoviti-POS.
- Innoviti-POS has already been piloted across 7 small towns with population between 5 to 15 lakhs and relatively lower digital penetration. About 700 merchants have currently been piloted with more than 15% of their business going digital.
Bengaluru-based leading payments company, Innoviti Technologies announced the market launch of its innovative Innoviti-POS card payment acceptance solution targeted at accelerating the adoption of POS-based digital payment acceptance amongst small town retailers. A multi-pronged distribution strategy has been piloted in 7 Tier -2/3 cities including Jaipur, Jammu, Ambala, Dehradun, Surat, Nagpur and Indore.
Less than 10% of India’s retail payments are currently digital, despite the short-term boost in POS installations post the currency demonetization exercise in November 2016. On one hand the merchants don’t see any clear benefits and feel their cost of doing business goes up by 1-2% (due to applicable Merchant Discount Rate (MDR) processing fees). On the other hand, they perceive an unwanted loss of flexibility in not being able to immediately use their daily sales proceeds from transactions on a given day, as typically settlement of digital transactions happens on the next bank working day, which can be even 2-3 days later in case of intervening holidays.
Less than 10% of India’s retail payments are currently digital, despite the short-term boost in POS installations post the currency demonetization exercise in November 2016. On one hand the merchants don’t see any clear benefits and feel their cost of doing business goes up by 1-2% (due to applicable Merchant Discount Rate (MDR) processing fees). On the other hand, they perceive an unwanted loss of flexibility in not being able to immediately use their daily sales proceeds from transactions on a given day, as typically settlement of digital transactions happens on the next bank working day, which can be even 2-3 days later in case of intervening holidays.
Designed specifically to ease the transition from cash-to-cards for such first-time card accepting merchants, the Innoviti-POS solution hits these problems at their core. Firstly, the product transfers funds for all transactions done on a day till 6 p.m. on the same day at 8 p.m. The retailer can therefore withdraw his day’s sales proceeds as cash from an ATM or use it to issue cheques on the very same day.
Moreover, Innoviti-POS assures this same day settlement on all 365-days of the years irrespective of bank holidays. This settlement on bank holidays helps them save valuable interest on any bank overdrafts taken by the retailer for managing the working capital for their business. Retailers reduce overdraft interest by depositing their daily excess earnings everyday into their bank current account. If their earning is in cash, they cannot deposit the same on bank holidays. However, if the earning is through Innoviti-POS, that is directly deposited into their current account, thereby reducing the outstanding overdraft and therefore interest outgo.
There are ~120 bank holidays in a year, corresponding to weekends, festivals and other public holidays. Interestingly these are the very days that the retailer does maximum business too. This nearly 1/3rd of the whole year corresponds to almost 50% of the retailer’s business. Since they cannot deposit cash on these days, the interest outgo from these days for a Rs. 1,00,000 overdraft can amount to almost Rs. 10,000 in a year. This constitutes a substantial potential business cost saving for the retailer by using Innoviti-POS.
To deliver this paradigm shift for Indian retail market, the Innoviti-POS package also relieves the merchant of the need to open new current accounts to receive card settlements, as he can simply route them to any of his existing bank accounts.
These unique benefits, which they cannot get from cash or any other POS system, has attracted over 700 merchants in the pilot to adopt Innoviti-POS and start migrating their business from cash to card. Innoviti will now be commercially launching this product across the country.
Quotes:
Small town merchants till now have only seen the cost side of accepting digital payments and increased hassles. With Innoviti-POS, they are being exposed to the real power of digital technology, where their hard-earned money can earn more money for them. We strongly believe our same day, every day fund transfer technology will help new merchants enter card acceptance with an experience that is as good, if not better than cash. This has the potential to be the key to plugging the currently yawning supply-demand gap in terms of POS infrastructure in India retail.”– said Mr. Rajeev Agrawal, CEO, Innoviti.
About Innoviti Technologies Pvt. Ltd., Bengaluru, India.
Innoviti Technologies runs a payment platform that has a unique ability to add intelligence to traditional payment channels, enhancing their value. Merchants, brands and financial service providers use these intelligent payment channels to reduce cost and drive sales of their products. Innoviti processes over Rs. 40,000 Cr. of payment transactions, about 6% of all offline merchant payment transactions in India. This also includes Rs. 1.500 Cr. of transactions involving distribution of loans to consumers and small businesses. The most capital efficient company in this space, Innoviti processes more volume for every $ raised than any other payments company. The company is backed by marquee investors such as Catamaran Ventures, SBI Venture Capital and Bessemer Venture Partners.
For more information, please visit – https://innoviti.com/