Mumbai-based mobile PoS player MSwipe, which competes with EzeTap and iKaaz among others, is betting on the varied lot of SMEs for expansion.
Currently, the PoS player claims to work with banks like Axis Bank, Ratnakar Bank, Corporation Bank and others and caters to more than 75,000 merchants including Costa Coffee, Deals Kart, HDFC Life, Jabong, McDonald’s, Myntra, Quikr, Venky’s etc. In a similar development in July 2014, Indian Overseas Bank had partnered Chennai-based Skilworth Technologies to introduce a mPoS solution called Bijlipay for SMEs.
MSwipe raised around $25 million in series-C round last year from Ola Cabs and Meru Capital besides existing investors like Matrix Partners and others. Earlier, the 2012-founded company had raised $2 million in January 2013 and another $5 million in December 2013 from Matrix Partners India.
Mswipe has 80% of its clientele in the profile of small merchants or SMEs. The remaining 20% are larger merchants and corporates including ecommerce companies. MSwipe is looking to increase its SME customers by reducing the cost of deploying terminals at customer locations.
“This market, comprising small vendors and retailers, has largely been untapped because of multiple reasons such as high cost of customer acquisition, but the gap is huge. Also, most banks find it economically unviable to acquire and service small customers,” said Manish Patel, CEO, Mswipe.
“By various estimates, there are 12-14 million SMEs whereas there are 1.1 million PoS terminals and 650 million card holders.” MSwipe targets installing over a million terminals by 2020.
The company is also seeing growing demand for PoS terminals within professionals such as teachers and home service providers, who want to replace cash payments with PoS terminals According to market research company Ken Research, India’s payments market is expected to reach Rs 8,172.7 billion by 2019. This growth will be driven by mobile and card-based payment platforms such as m-banking, mobile wallets and mPoS.
Source: The Economic Times
