Ease of Doing Business for MSMEs: Ratan Tata-backed mobile point of sale (POS) player Mswipe, which focuses on compact and medium enterprise (SME) merchants, is hunting to develop 3x in its POS-merchant and QR-merchant base in the coming 3 years as it appears to obtain an NBFC license from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) in FY22 to develop into a digital compact finance bank for SMEs, Mswipe founder Manish Patel told TheSpuzz Online in an interaction.
“We want to be at 1.5 million POS (merchants) which is around 3x from today by 2024 and another 3x of 1.1 million QR merchants by 2024. We want to be an SME-focused bank as there is currently no bank exclusively focused on SMEs in the country today. There are banks that are consumer-focused, or large enterprise-focused but no bank largely focuses on SMEs at this point in time,” stated Patel. Mswipe at present has 6.75 lakh POS merchants.
In line with its move for the banking license, the startup had in July this year appointed former Cashe CEO Ketan Patel as the company’s new CEO. Mswipe intends to one-quit-shop for SMEs with respect to payment or finance demands, acquire now spend later, direct lending, managing inventory, micro ATMs, and so forth. The move to enter loan providing to shoppers is seen as a move to enhance earnings for fintech organizations in comparison to enabling payments or processing payments. In June this year, BharatPe had reportedly acquired the NBFC license in partnership with Centrum. Other fintech startups such as OkCredit and Khatabook had been also reportedly hunting at NBFC license.
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Meanwhile, Mswipe on Wednesday had gone live with e-RUPI adoption for its POS and QR merchants to get vaccinated for Covid-19 at hospitals and healthcare facilities via the digital vouchers of e-RUPI. “Progressively, over the next few weeks, almost all customers on Mswipe will be able to access this facility, and then incrementally every merchant we onboard will automatically have this feature. Of approximately 20,000 merchants we onboard every month, every single merchant will have access to this e-RUPI feature,” Patel added.
e-RUPI is a one-time cashless and contactless payment mechanism launched by PM Narendra Modi in August to strengthen the Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) scheme. The scheme was launched to allow “person and purpose-specific” transfer of income beneath DBT schemes of the Ministry of Health, to start with, to the beneficiary’s mobile phone (which includes feature phones) via a QR code or an SMS. Merchants would be in a position to accept the code or SMS devoid of any app or card intervention or even web banking via e-RUPI created by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI).