After 5 elements of nature, payments should be the 6th
The vision of taking high-end technologies to the bottom of the pyramid gave birth to PayNearby. Establishing it as a viable touchpoint in the rural areas is the journey the company is now into, says Anand Bajaj, CEO. Edited excerpts:
How did PayNearby get into this particular business of rural payments? Where did it start and how did you take it over?
Our vision is ‘ Har Dukan Digital Pradhan’. It is not a poetry but an ambition we intend to deploy in the country. The concept is nearby shops doubling up as assisted commerce, payment, invest-ment and insurance digital touchpoints. Everyone then gets interested in partnering - be it an e-commerce or FMCG company, or a bank or an insurance partner as all of them are looking for outreach in a viable manner. The vision emanated from the realization that the high-end technolo-gy needs to be taken to the bottom of the pyramid. Most of the work done on the technology front is limited to the selfservice conducive segment. How do we work on to take this to the masses? The outcome was to make it granular, standard and universal. We created these formulae that could be executed. Sitting at the bank, we did a fantastic job and we realized that lot needs to be done before meeting the road as the reality is more aggressive, different, challenging, and excit-ing. Hence, we stepped out of the bank to take this vision to reality. Thus, was formed PayNearby.
Can you throw some light on your technology journey till date?
It is not easy to bring together some 18,000 postal codes of India and half a million retail partners working in tandem and connect with the main lines of all the payment streams and banking services. Nearly `56 billion of sachetized financial services come naturally on this robust back-bone. These are distributed extensions of banking partners. Imagine them as a digital world where you can take this distribution and this rail to the hinterlands of the country and connect multiple dots of services on top in the
same way. In partnership with our customers and consumers, we have built a robust tech platform, which connects on the one hand to the supply side with open API architecture. And on the other hand, it is a never-ending deep distribution stream which goes into the country.
There is a vast difference between a vision and a technology vision. Very few people are able to bifurcate the two because these are 2 lines and 2 layers. There are modules built by NPCI, Visa, MasterCard, which are robust and scalable. But it is for us to go and harness them from 600 TPS to 60,000 TPS. That is the vision to be accomplished. You are fighting with thousands-of-years-old habit of using cash. To replace that with digital payments without a guidebook is not easy be-cause technology is not enough.
Experience drives business, inspiration, customers. What is the experience that you are de-vising to reach out to the people?
Like the 5 elements of earth, water, fire, wind and space, payment should be the 6th element. One need not find it or experience it separately, but it should be a part of life. Cash is part of life. But if it is so very opaque and it gets integrated into the lives like the 5 elements, that is the user expe-rience that you would want to create.
That experience will bring speed to commerce, transparency and credibility to the trade and help you get loans with ease and yet prompt you to get insured automatically. So, data intelligence along with human intelligence and artificial intelligence will command the experience for the users in times to come.
As a fintech leader, what is your vision today? Ten years from now, how will the payment in-dustry and the banking industry change?
The road ahead is like a treadmill and the journey becomes the destination. But look at the new licenses coming in, new possibilities that are emerging, the new use cases and new segments being carved out regularly. With the never-ending balance between the enhancements on one hand and controls on the other hand, it is a perpetual balancing task. Every new task brings new opportunities, challenges, a possibility of risk and possibility of user experience balancing. Deployment of Indiastack seems to be our part of the journey in the Southeast Asia and Africa market. The work done by Indiastack with NPCI and by the UIDAI is waiting to be deployed world over. That’s the journey ahead and the roadmap.