Mastercard, Mswipe tie-up to strengthen digital payment acceptance in India

Committed to make India a cashless economy and enhance digital acceptance, Mastercard on Tuesday announced its tie-up with technology company Mswipe to launch Asia's first digital merchant on boarding solution.

The platform will help increase the acceptance footprint exponentially in India by 2020, as at present, India has around 2.9 million PoS terminals with over 60 million merchants.

This unique solution to digitally validate and authenticate KYC documents has been developed by Bangalore-based start-up Signzy. Currently, KYC is entrenched in the offline mode where physical documents are collated and submitted for completion, which takes at least three days.

"Through this collaboration, our focus is to deliver convenient, safe and secure technologies for merchants to accept electronic payments that will boost acceptance infrastructure in the country," said division president, South Asia, Mastercard, Porush Singh.

"Mswipe's objective is to digitize not only payments but all other business processes around payments. While almost every other element of the merchant acceptance business has gone digital, KYC authentication remains a big hurdle and leads to inefficient and sub-optimal merchant on-boarding experience," said CEO Mswipe, Manish Patel.

Adding to this, Manish added that the new solution, developed in partnership with Signzy and Mastercard, will become Asia's first merchant acquirer to offer a digital on boarding platform with real time KYC.

"The solution is in line with Prime Minister Narendra Modi's vision for Digital India," added Patel.

"Through this collaboration, we hope to create a convenient yet safe digital infrastructure that ensures business innovation," added co-founder Signzy, Arpit Ratan.

Mastercard's recent efforts in India have been towards providing full ecosystem and cash management tools to the SME segment, to encourage them to go cashless.

Its partnership with CAIT (Confederation of All India Traders), drove a campaign with 63 million merchants and traders to create much greater awareness of benefits of electronic payments within the merchant community.

Mswipe currently has a payment network of 2.8 lakh terminals spread across over 644 cities. As much as 80 percent of Mswipe's customer base comprises SME merchants, typically supported by 1-30 employees.

It has integrated the solution with its field-force automation app F2A2, named on the lines of the iconic R2D2 robot from Star Wars, to enable its 2,000-strong sales team to digitally capture merchant profile information, KYC documents, and authenticate them in real time against 40+ different government databases.