From the shop floor

Change is underway in the deployment of point-of-sale devices, but the business may need a tweak, reports RAGHU MOHAN

- RAGHU MOHAN

Two years ago, Worldline (India)—the Indian arm of the French payments firm—launched VABOX (Voice Alert Box): Merchants would get instant audio alerts on settlement of UPI (Unified Payments Interface) payments via QR codes in the language of their choice when customers checked out. It took the point-of-sale (PoS) device ecosystem nearly two decades to reach 10 million in deployments, whereas UPI sound boxes are at 12–14 million installations already.

"This growth trajectory is expected to continue, with sound boxes projected to reach 40 million over the next five years. We have recognised the shift. The focus is on sound boxes and we have three lakh [300,000] devices. Our goal is to scale this to a million over the next two years," says Ketan Patel, cofounder and chief executive officer (CEO) of Mswipe, one of the largest non-bank deployers in the country. The big change underway, as Ramakrishnan Ramamurthy, chief delivery and operations officer at Worldline (India), views it, is the sound box driving the next set of innovations: value-adds, embedded payments, check-out experience, in-system integrations, and comprehensive reconciliation.

"The transition from card-present to card-not-present, and customer-present to customer-not-present can also be enabled through embedded solutions like link-pay," he says.