Pine Labs gears up for next phase of growth, plans to foray into new mkts

Digital retail payments platform Pine Labs is gearing up for the next phase of its journey.  It is planning to bring in the latest solutions that aim at proving better customer experience, foray into new markets and categories, and eventually go for an initial public offering (IPO) which may happen over the next two years.

In the next couple of years, the Noida-based firm is also expecting the total payment volume (TPV) on its transactions to rise more than four-fold to $100 billion from $23 billion. 

That would put Pine Labs in the league of US-based financial and merchant services firm Square Inc, whose gross payment volume in the most recent fiscal period amounted to $84.65 billion, up from 65.35 billion in 2017, according to data platform Statista.

One of the major innovations by the company which is currently in the testing phase, is replacing its traditional point of sales (PoS) devices with mobile phones which the merchants can use for accepting credit and debit cards as well as QR codes and wallet payments.  A merchant can also enable the phone of his assistant to accept these payments while he can track the transactions on his own mobile device.

“We really want to play on efficient technology and not create cheaper mPos (mobile point of sales) or products as they are part of the journey and not the destination,” said Vicky Bindra, chief executive officer (CEO) of Pine Labs. 

The product is expected to be rolled out in the next couple of months.

Established in 1998, Pine Labs has evolved from a petroleum automation retail solutions player to becoming a payments products and services firm for merchants. Its solutions, which are used by merchants from diverse sectors, are used by over 100,000 merchants in India and several other Asian countries. In India alone, the company’s cloud-based platform powers over 350,000 PoS terminals in over 3,700 towns. 

In the next phase, Pine Labs is getting into providing loans to merchants in partnerships with banks as well as NBFCs and package other services such as insurance with it. It will also provide goods and services tax (GST) payments on behalf of these merchants. 

“I think for the last 18 months, we are taking the journey of becoming a platform company,” said Bindra, who before joining Pine Labs in 2015 led Visa’s global product and solutions group in San Francisco.

In March, Google Pay had formed partnerships with Pine Labs and also another payments solutions firm Innoviti to enable UPI payments across a massive footprint of PoS terminals spanning 200,000 stores in over 3,500 cities and towns in the country.