Digital payment major Mastercard has joined hands with private lender Axis Bank and French payment service provider Worldline, in a bid to offer the functionality of Point of Sale devices onto Android smartphones of small merchants in India while also be providing store owners value added digitisation services.
The strategic alliance is created for expanding acceptance infrastructure for contactless card payments in the Indian market by bringing down the costs of physical deployments by replacing swipe machines with an application on their NFC enabled smartphones, reported ET.
The card network provider along with private sector bank announced the launch of the app that’ll enable subscription-based services namely digital onboarding, payment acceptance and digital accounting services on a single interface for small merchants. The app will also be offering small businesses offer online services to neighbourhood customers; a feature integrated onto the app by SaaS player Zoho.
“What differentiates our product from other players is that it is world’s first comprehensive soft-POS with end to end digital solutions,” Rajeev Kumar, senior vice president – market development, South Asia, Mastercard told ET.
“Our aim is to expand the acceptance infrastructure from the current 7 million merchants to 10 million merchants in the next two years.”
