Fintech’s Everywhere in India. Banks Need a Counterattack
Payment apps are quickly cornering the SME sector. What can old-fashioned lenders do?
Many shops use as many as four different payment apps.
Photographer: PUNIT PARANJPE/AFPVisit a mid-sized store in an Indian city, and you’d wonder if it exists to make any money. It might just as well be there to process transactions for half-a-dozen payment apps: PhonePe, Paytm, Google Pay, BharatPe, Amazon Pay and MobiKwik. Add up the merchants who have downloaded the digital services and the figure quickly reaches 80 million. A third of India’s 60 million-plus small businesses are using an average of four different platforms, according to Raman Khanduja, the chief executive officer of Mintoak, a Mumbai-based fintech.
“The neighborhood shopkeepers’ bandwidth is getting sucked into accepting money,” he says. “When do they run their business?”