How is Pine Labs helping SMEs to adopt digital payments with ease during Covid?

Pine Labs company evolved from a petroleum automation retail solutions player to becoming a payments products and services firm for merchants. It, today, is an Indian merchant platform company that provides financing and last-mile retail transaction technology. It is one of the unicorn companies that makes software for point of sale machines.

Here is Pine Lab's journey during the pandemic especially about their latest addition of Plutus Smart; and the company's market reach.

The Customer

Today, merchant businesses of varying size are on a constant lookout for ways to scale up their business and financial technology or fintech is helping them do just that. At Pine Labs, we have always aimed at creating meaningful business relationships with our now over 150,000 strong merchant base that enables growth and accelerates commerce for these merchants across Asia.

In sync with our vision where we believe that every business can grow exponentially with technology and capital, we launched Plutus Smart, our Android PoS in 2019. Besides enabling merchants to accept payments through multiple modes, it also allowed them to streamline and digitize various aspects of their business through a single device – from inventory management to GST compliance, analytics among other things.

Plutus Smart

Faster digitization of the Indian economy, a dream far from realization sometime back, has now found a renewed acceleration in recent times. While large-sized merchants were early to adopt the point of sale technology-of-the-future, the rate of adoption was very slow amongst small and mid-sized merchants.

That said, with the pace at which it has accelerated during the ongoing pandemic, it will be safe to state that – while demonetisation in 2016 gave a fillip to consumer-side adoption of digital payments, COVID-19 has propelled merchants to migrate to digital payments to find new avenues of growth and adapt to the changing consumer behaviour which is more inclined towards digital payments and cautious spending during the pandemic. We are spearheading this digital transformation for our merchant partners and helping them with innovative fintech products that reduce business complexity for them and increase profitability.

The Challenge

COVID-19 has led to merchants, especially small and mid-sized businesses, who are now on the lookout to adopt smart PoS technologies which are easy to adopt and asset-light. One of the biggest challenges facing merchants today is wooing consumers back to the store and more importantly find ways to increase consumer spending.

The Solution:

Pine Labs is constantly experimenting and rolling out innovative products that can help solve the pain points of our merchant partners. Pine Labs’ in-store Android PoS has several exciting features, few of these include:

• Ability to accept multiple payments: Plutus Smart accepts over 100+ modes of payments including debit/credit cards, UPI, Bharat QR, wallets etc.

• Activation of Pay Later or EMI option: Increasing consumer spending which is one of the biggest challenges facing merchants today can be resolved when merchants get the ability to offer and activate EMIs at the point of sale. This task is made seamless through Plutus Smart which has a built-in EMI calculator to help merchants arrive at the best bank/brand EMI option that the customer wants to pick.

• Business Apps: Pine Labs has over 50 business applications that can be integrated with its Android PoS to digitize several important areas of commerce for merchants. These include inventory management, GST compliance, capturing customer feedback, barcode scanning, invoicing, etc. These applications have been built by developers using Pine Labs’ open APIs.

The Team

As one of Asia’s leading fintech platforms, we have always strived to create efficient and affordable financial technology solutions for merchants so that they can grow their business with us.

To give an example, only businesses dealing in essential services were operational during the initial phases of the nationwide lockdown due to COVID-19. Pine Labs launched a mobile app called ePOS by Pine Labs that helped these merchants convert their Android smartphone into a payment acceptance device. In less than a month, there were 14,000 downloads of this app and at the same time, we even opened ePOS APIs for the developer community.

We believe that our merchant partners are the lifeline of the nation and it is our constant endeavour to provide them with an end-to-end tech-driven platform which adds value to their day-to-day activities and helps them to grow their business exponentially.

The Implementation:

The introduction of Android PoS was a refreshing evolution of the traditional point of sale device. There was a need to educate merchants around the capabilities of this smart Android-powered PoS and how it could improve their efficiency. Today, we are witnessing tremendous growth in the Android PoS segment. We used several platforms to build this awareness such as our corporate website, social media channels, and through proactive marketing, outreach to educate and inform our merchant base on the benefits of this smart PoS technology.