PoS terminals and the future of digital payments

The offline unorganised segment will drive merchant payment digitisation with QR codes and sound boxes - devices with speakers that display alerts for merchants when transactions are processed

India has witnessed an over 300 per cent rise in the adoption of point-of-sale (PoS) terminals over the past five years; and as of FY22, more than 6 million such terminals had been installed. But their density is still low compared with other Brics nations, and the PoS acceptance infrastructure is concentrated in the Tier-I and Tier-II cities, owing to the low viability and high cost of deployment in villages. And UPI (Unified Payments Interface) — owing to its interoperable architecture — has supercharged the transition to non-cash payments, especially in P2P (person-to-person) fund transfers and the low-value P2M (person-to-merchant)