On June 4, 2020 Axis Bank Ltd, Mastercard India & Worldline India partnered to launch a digital point-of-sale(POS) solution ‘Soft POS’, the 1st financial payments service in India to transform everyday smartphones into merchant POS terminals. It helps offline merchants and Kirana stores accept payments using their smartphones.
- Through this app merchants who traditionally accept cash payments will now have a simpler and more secure way to manage transactions.
Key Points
i.The app allows banks to have complete visibility of a merchant’s transactions, which makes it easier for small merchants to get business loans.
ii.The solution enables merchants to accept payments through various digital form factors which include Bharat QR, sending payment links to customers and accepting Near Field Communication(NFC) based technology payments to boost contactless payments in the country.
iii.The service offers features which include E-Khata for reconciliations, recording store credit transactions, a cash register to record transactions at store & an Online Dukkan, where merchants can list their products for consumers to make online orders for home deliveries.
iv.Soft POS provides a cost-effective card acceptance solution for all micro-merchants and SMEs in India by eliminating the need to invest in a POS device.
v.Merchants can accept contactless payments directly by their own Android smartphones, this functionality is called “Tap on Phone” which means a cardholder can tap his/her contactless card on the merchant Smartphone with NFC functionality and so encourages social distancing.
vi.Mastercard provides white-label technology for this solution and aims to equip 10 million small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in India by 2021 through various banking partnerships & plans to take this solution to other South Asian markets including Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal over the next year, through partnerships.
vii.The online registration process with the acquiring bank takes less than 30 minutes.
Other partnership of Mastercard
Mastercard has also partnered with Zoho Corp to help merchants with large turnovers to file their goods and services tax(GST) returns, among other services.
About Axis Bank:
Headquarters– Mumbai, Maharashtra
Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer– Amitabh Chaudhry
About MasterCard:
Headquarters– New York, United States
Chief Executive Officer– Ajay Banga, Michael Miebach will succeed him by Jan1, 2021. (Please also refer: https://affairscloud.com/current-affairs-february-26-2020/)
Chairman and Co-founder– Richard Haythornthwaite.
About Worldline:
Worldline is the parent organisation of worldline India
Headquarters– Bezons, France
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer– Gilles Grapinet
