My friendly neighbourhood kirana (mama-&-papa store) has a shelf dedicated to QR codes. Right above the bananas and below the potatoes, a stretch of blank space is absolutely wallpapered with the little black and white squares—Google Pay, PhonePe, BharatPe, Amazon, Paytm, you name it. That could very well be the defining image of India’s digital payments growth story. It took banks more than 20 years to convince merchants to add point-of-sale devices to their shop counters. Indian banks have managed to add slightly over six million PoS machines in an ecosystem that has over 70 million current accounts. Fintech apps, on the other hand, have racked up close to 25 million merchants in the last five years or so. But that’s not how India’s banks, which have traditionally been at the top of the money hierarchy before fintech knocked them off their perch, want you to remember it. They want what fintechs have, and they’re planning to use the same weapon in the fintech arsenal to get it—QR codes. Banks like HDFC Bank and State Bank of India are partnering with payments platforms—in this case, a four-year-old startup called Mintoak—to provide a white-labelled payments app to merchants that would act as a one-stop-shop for all digital payment methods. From cards and wallets to QR codes. You see, in the years since digital payments exploded in the country, the number of players in the ecosystem has also gone up. And merchants have had to go from signing up for one payments app to more than they could count. Which merchant is going to tell their customers that a particular payment method isn’t accepted? UPI solved multiple pain points for merchants. It saved them from the tyranny of handling change, while also depositing money directly into their accounts. Except, five years in, merchants seem to have traded those conveniences for fresh headaches. Banks’ all-in-one QR code strategy could provide a solution, but then again, when was the last time anyone trusted bank tech?
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