Paypoint India grabbed the big opportunity of cashless payments by preparing its systems in time through digital transformation strategy
SACHIN LOKHANDE
PAYPOINT INDIA
We achieved the main grip after November 8, 2016, post-demonetisation declaration. The business has grown more than 600 per cent as the platform was ready in the market and other competitors were doing advertising campaign. We benefitted from demonetisation and could get into market in a major way.
While demonetisation of `500 and `1000 currency notes created challenges for many individuals and businesses, some organisations saw it as an opportunity to take their digital transformation journey forward. Paypoint India Network, a fast-moving consumer services company and a prepaid payment instrument (PPI) licence holder, emphasised on improving its digital offerings at a time when competition focussed on branding and advertising.
One of the 41 applicants for a payment bank licence for which it had joined hands with Sudhir Valia of Sun Pharma, Paypoint could not make the cut as the RBI granted in-principle nod to 11 players. But digital transformation helped the company tremendously due to which it now plans to scale up its mobile wallet and roll out new services including “assisted e-commerce”. An assisted e-commerce service will enable an individual to walk into a Paypoint franchisee store, select an e-tailer's products, make the payment and take delivery, either at his house or at the store.
The company devised a single point of contact for every department to decide the scope of work and deliverables to avoid back and forth between departments. “Based on the scope of work and deliverables, the project manager will chase the project through its entire lifecycle. In case of any deviation in guidelines or timelines, there will be one defined escalation matrix and everyone will follow the same,“ explains Lokhande.
The journey, however, was not easy, considering the highly regulated environment that Paypoint had to work within. “When it comes to financial inclusion and RBI regulatory board, we have a fallback system in place as per the RBI by-laws. In this age of digital transformation, we have upgraded our infrastructure to take load and huge spikes. We have changed the entire infrastructure within weeks after the server/ lease line/ switch/ load balancer started and having disaster recovery and fallback rollover over data centre plans,” shares Lokhande.
Paypoint offers services such as banking where an individual can open an account, withdraw and deposit cash and transfer money. Some of its other products include facilitating bill payments, mobile and DTH recharges, ticket bookings and collection of two-wheeler insurance premium. “The card will have prepaid top-ups from our 47,000-plus outlets or through net banking, debit card/ credit card and can be used anywhere,” he explains.
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