Tone Tag makes strong headway in sound-based financial transaction

The company has uniquely positioned itself in the mobile payments industry by using sound waves to enable offline financial payments at retail stores.

Smartphones have eased financial transactions and enabled app-based payments at retail stores. However, mobile-based payments sector in India is still at best in early stages of evolution. One big gap is contactless payment at the point of sale (POS). This is primarily because Internet is yet to get more integrated in our lives to qualify as intrinsic to our lives. Not all times, the consumer is connected to the Internet to enable mobile-based payments and also perhaps because the smartphone is not NFC enabled.

A startup called ToneTag that enables digital payments without Internet has come up with a solution. The company has uniquely positioned itself in the mobile payments industry by using sound waves to enable offline financial payments at retail stores. Founded in 2013, ToneTag founders Kumar Abhishek and Vivek Singh have ensured that they leave a permanent footprint with their technology in the mobile-based payments industry. ToneTag operates out of its Bengaluru office with a team of 36 technically sound enthusiasts.

Exploiting sound as an out-of-the-box idea

“I came up with the idea of starting a company on my own at Singapore, where I was working as a business consultant in information technology, retail, financial services and core banking applications for Infosys. In a conversation with my friend, he jokingly questioned me as to why in India we get candies instead of balance cash of 50 paise or 1 rupee? The question made me realize that there is a need for a better payment mechanism in India that does not use cash. And these days a person might step out without a wallet but will never do so without a mobile phone. I immediately started doing extensive research on the viability of digital payments in India. I came to India to study the market, the usage patterns of people and the problems they faced during payments. I met people from urban as well as rural India, which gave me tremendous insight into the pain points of payments and how we can solve it. In a country like India, where cash is the most used payment method, millions are locked out of formal financial services,” says Kumar Abhishek, Founder of ToneTag.

After doing extensive research and gaining expertise, with —Kumar Abhishek his friend Vivek Singh, Abhishek established ToneTag to provide contactless payments facility in India. They experimented with various existing payment technologies such as NFC, QR codes, etc., but they came across a number of issues with these, primarily the high cost of deployment and lack of interoperability.

Working on pros and cons of all the technologies that enable contactless payment, Abhishek was not convinced that he could form a company based on any of these. In a casual chat with his father, one day,Abhishek explained to him about the struggle of creating a business with digital payment as the idea. Abhishek explained to his father that his intention is to use a technology that enables contactless payment at ease and he was very clear that this application should not be dependent on hardware/Internet and at the same time should be easy to deploy. His father, an engineer too, casually expressed why