How Tiny, Cheap Smart Speakers Unlocked the Rise of Digital Payments in India
- Author: Adnan Bhat
- Full Title: How Tiny, Cheap Smart Speakers Unlocked the Rise of Digital Payments in India
- Category: articles
- Document Tags: #tech
- URL: https://restofworld.org/2023/india-sound-boxes-paytm-phonepe/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feeds
Highlights
- sound box” — a nifty internet-connected device that reads out payment confirmation messages. (View Highlight)
- The sound box device — first introduced by India’s largest fintech company, Paytm, in 2019 — has been a runaway hit among small Indian businesses. Neighborhood mom-and-pop stores (kiranas) and street vendors, who had traditionally shied away from paying for tech services, have warmed up to the sound box. The smart device — essentially a speaker bearing the logo of the fintech company facilitating the transactions — comes with a built-in SIM card. Most sound boxes can read out payment confirmation messages in English and multiple Indian languages, such as Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, and Punjabi. In Indian cities and towns, sound boxes can now be seen across diverse businesses — from kiranas and clothing stores to produce carts and shops selling smoking products. (View Highlight)
- Sound boxes have become a lucrative proposition for Indian fintech companies. Digital payments have taken off in a big way in India in recent years due to the government’s unified payments interface (UPI) that allows users to make instant bank transfers with mobile phones. The volume of UPI transactions in the country grew from 20 million in the 2017 financial year to 60 billion by the third quarter of the 2023 financial year, according to data from the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), which runs UPI. The value of UPI transactions made in the same period skyrocketed from 1,000 crore rupees (over $121 million) to 100 lakh crore rupees (over $1.2 trillion), the data shows. (View Highlight)
- The company has 6.8 million devices deployed across the country. The spokesperson said Paytm has tied up with a domestic manufacturer to produce both the hardware and software for its sound box. (View Highlight)
- Confirmation that money has come was a perennial issue for vendors,” Pai told Rest of World. “A lot of vendors had feature phones with SMS limits, and hence, confirmations of payments didn’t come in real time as SMS inboxes were full. Some asked to see customers’ phones or asked customers to send [the payments] again, which led to lots of arguments and a poor checkout experience. Sound box [services] seem to have solved that problem.” (View Highlight)