By Srinath Srinivasan,
Mumbai-primarily based PayNearby, co-founded by Anand Kumar Bajaj, Subhash Kumar, Yashwant Lodha and Rajesh Jha, aims to take integrated commerce hyperlocal, through kirana retailers, provided that these are the closest point of commerce in any provided Indian locality, in particular in rural India.
At the moment, the PayNearby app has 22 services listed on the app. During the lockdown, the usage of the platform went up, says Anand Kumar Bajaj. “We were able to assist customers through the trusted kirana store – where they could ask for, say, potatoes, onions and also money transfers. Once we began doing this, volumes and number of transactions really shot up, and we had to really do a technological augmentation to keep up with the increased demand, to continue scaling,” he adds.
There are more than 17,200 pincodes on the PayNearby platform that are receiving serviced and most of them are in rural places. The shops listed on the platform act as aggregation centres. “When a migrant worker visits a PayNearby kirana store, he can simply swipe his card. Our Aadhaar Enabled Payments System or Micro ATMs will take care of what he wants to do. Transfer or withdraw money, open account or fixed deposit or pay bills,” explains Bajaj.
PayNearby is adding 30,000-40,000 kirana retailers just about every month on the platform. The dwindling ATMs and the price connected to managing them are additional contributing aspects to the rise of this company. Apart from enabling discovery of nearby retailers, the app lets customers spot orders on the net and get products from the nearest retailers.
“We have integrated with two large partner banks who are attaching our database to FMCG companies. Because customers place orders on our platform, we can offer data driven insights to FMCG brands about which products sell through the kirana stores and which don’t, across the country,” says Bajaj, speaking about the possible of the platform to move up the worth chain and enabling inventory management for customer brands at a hyperlocal level. Bajaj aims to retain expanding the services quarter on quarter.
“We are platform first and network next. We have partnerships with companies such as Muthoot Gold and extended lead for them for gold loan. We have partnered with a few banks to sell lending services,” adds Bajaj. In this entire network, the kirana retailer owners get a steady technologies platform and an incentive for just about every transaction that requires spot on it, by means of them. Incentives begin from .5% and goes all the way up to 11-12%.
Today there are more than 5 lakh retailers on PayNearby who sell numerous services and items. It tells retailers what type of services or items are in demand in a distinct region and educates them to sell these more, through videos and other types of content. They are also provided a leaderboard inside their pincodes, visible only to them, primarily based on how they drive commerce in their locality.