PoS units can't be dumb any more, says Mswipe founder Manish Patel

Phones have become 'smartphones', and TVs have become 'smart TVs'. Everything is becoming smarter, but we mostly have dumb terminals at merchant outlets, says Patel

Mswipe Technologies is rewiring merchant-customer interface by changing the game. The country’s largest deployer of point-of-sale (PoS) machines, with 630,000-plus units, has raised $95 million over the last three years. Manish Patel, founder and chief executive officer, spoke to Raghu Mohan. Edited excerpts:

On the impact of zero merchant discount rate (MDR)

It applies to online payments and large entities with a turnover above Rs 50 crore per annum. Small and medium enterprises make up 85 per cent of our merchant base. Our strategy is like Netflix’s — merchants pay a flat, monthly subscription, and use whatever and how much ever they want. The popular notion is that merchants gain only from transaction processing. Our merchants get transaction processing, checkout finance, EMI and a plethora of applications that help in making business better, as well as providing access to loans.

On ‘Wisepos plus’ and ‘Moneystore’ as change agents

‘Wisepos’ is like a smartphone and ‘Moneystore’ is like our Google play-store in which merchants can explore and discover apps on a terminal and use it. When I look around the payment industry, we mostly have dumb terminals. What makes a terminal ‘smart’ is the operating system it runs on. We committed four years ago to work hard to deliver the most cost-optimised ‘smart terminals’.

On how smart-PoS works in everyday life

Take Mumbai Traffic Police’s e-challan. The constable raises a flag on an errant motorist, scans the number plate, and looks at all previous fines (if any) of the driver. But the constable had only cash as an option to collect the fine. The ‘Wisepos’ terminal allows the cops to run their application directly on a secured device, collect payments and resolve the reconciliation process.

On what ‘Gofrugal’, ‘e-paisa’, and ‘Petpooja’ means for the retailer

The same as ‘Tally’ is for billing. But small merchants have to buy a desktop costing around Rs 50,000 to use it. Our terminals run on Android and employees at merchant outlets are used to it anyway. It’s more like learning applications on a mobile-styled interface.

On the partnership with small and mid-sized software houses

They typically have two problems. Firstly, they are unable to find an effective distribution channel countrywide for their apps; and secondly, while they could use Google Playstore to distribute their apps, they still didn’t have complete integration. A restaurant will have to get the app integrated to print the bill, have barcode as well as other integration. Our platform has all this built-in as a plug-and-play for an app developer.