Private lender ICICI Bank launched its ‘Merchant Stack’, a set of digital banking services specially curated for retail merchants.
The range of banking as well as value-added services enables merchants — grocers, super markets, large retail store chains, online businesses and large e-commerce firms— to meet their banking requirements seamlessly so that they can continue to serve their customers in the challenging times during the pandemic.
This development is in sync with the lender’s principle of ‘Business with Care’. Retail merchants can avail of these contactless services, without visiting the Bank’s branches, at a time when people are advised to stay home and maintain social distancing.
Merchants m can avail of these facilities instantly, on InstaBIZ, the Bank’s mobile banking application for businesses.
Commenting on the launch, Anup Bagchi, ICICI Bank said, “We always believe that the self-employed and the MSME segment forms the backbone of the Indian economy. A large part of this segment consists of retail merchants. There are over 2 crore merchants in the country with approximately USD 780 billion in value of transactions in 2020. They are expected to grow rapidly in the coming years. Through these trying times of the pandemic, it is our endeavour to enable the merchants with a digital banking platform that will help them to continue to serve their customers. We have thus launched the ‘Merchant Stack’, which most importantly offers a range of ‘contactless’ banking services, providing safety to the merchants and their customers alike. This new offering is part of our guiding principle of ‘Business with Care’. It is also a continuation of ‘ICICI Stack’ which we launched a year ago to offer retail customers all digital banking services from one platform.
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We believe that the ‘Merchant Stack’ offers the most holistic array of banking and value-added banking services for the retail merchant ecosystem. Our research shows that this segment requires digital and instant account opening, multiple digital collection options in one place and quick working capital availability, among others. Armed with these insights, we have created a full stack that brings in a host of digital services specially curated for merchants. Further, all of the solutions are available on our mobile application, InstaBiz. We have also leveraged advanced analytics to use various parameters of POS transactions to offer instant overdraft and settlement of the swipes. We believe that this ‘all-in-one’ and comprehensive ‘Merchant Stack’ will provide easy digital banking to retailers, free up their bandwidth from paper-intensive procedures and thus boost their business growth by improving overall productivity and efficiency.”
