Amidst Currency Demonetization, Digital Money Thrives in India

As the country is looking for ways to absorb the government of India’s decision to demonetize INR 1000 and INR 500 notes – there is a huge increase in the way digital money is being utilized today.

PayU India comes to the rescue of small and medium businesses. The PayUmoney Seller App and Sellfie is available for Android & Apple devices allows users to accept payments digitally.

While India is grappling with the sudden demonetization of INR 500 and 1000 currency notes, the end consumer has been the focal point of every debate and discussion.

What everyone seems to be forgetting is that the small to medium merchants are also struggling to cope with these recent developments. Many of them have been compelled to temporarily close shops because of low availability or absence of cash.

With a view to address the woes of the merchants, PayU India has launched an aggressive campaign to support merchants through two of its disruptive products: PayUmoney Seller App and Sellfie. These mobile apps are very well positioned at rescuing the merchants’ business from the current challenges, by enabling them to accept payments digitally.

Merchants can download the PayUmoney Seller App from Google or App store and get activated in literally 2 mins. They can then create bills and send the link to consumers via Whatsapp, Email, SMS or other apps. The consumers, in return can use the link to pay via credit or debit card and net-banking. Whether it’s a customer walking into the store or a delivery boy standing at customer’s doorstep, the app makes it possible to seamlessly accept payments.

Selfie is another innovative product from PayU for small merchants or even consumers who probably operate out of their homes and sell on social media channels like FB/Instagram/Twitter. With Selfie, the merchant can simply click a picture of their product and share the same with their network on social media or Whatsapp. The interested users can ask questions to merchant and then pay for the product digitally via the same link.

Further commenting on the Seller App campaign, Pradeep Shekhawat, Head of SMB Business at PayU India said, “This is a historic initiative by the Indian government and will become a milestone in curbing black money and promoting the use of digital payments. At PayU, we are committed to drive innovative FinTech solutions that simplify merchant’s lives and enable rapid business growth for them. We have leveraged our in-house user experience lab and cutting edge data-analytics capability to come up with these apps to solve specific pain points that merchant community faces.”

The PayUmoney Seller App can be downloaded from app stores of Apple or Android and within 2 steps, helps the businesses go digital and accept payment via credit card, debit card and NEFT transfers. Sellfie would come to the aid of sellers utilizing social media networks like Whatsapp, Instagram, Facebook, etc to push their products.

“I must add that the merchant community has shown tremendous initiative in the last few days to adopt our apps, resulting in app downloads going up by 250% and transaction volumes witnessing an 85% jump. We are affirmative that more and more merchants, who have been perturbed by the present state of economy, would be comforted by the two apps and resume operations without any further loss of business and opportunities”, he further added.
Speaking on this development, Vipul Parekh, Co-Founder, Chief Finance Officer & Chief Marketing Officer, bigbasket, said, "We welcome the step and feel that it will help increase transparency and improve overall business efficiency by minimizing the hassles due to cash handling. It does not negatively impact us in terms of demand. In fact, we have witnessed a 25% jump in online transactions in the past 48 hours. We are committed to providing a hassle-free experience to all our customers and are sending out regular communication to them with respect to the various available safe payment modes that include card/ bank / wallet / meal tickets & cash options. While we are encouraging them to pay online, the COD option is also available across all our 30 cities which can be availed in smaller denomination notes. We also continue to offer card on delivery option - which proves to be very useful for customers in this situation. We have also allowed for debit notes to be raised for our frequently ordering customers with order values less than Rs. 2000 - in case they did not have change."

Commenting on this demonetization effort by the government, Vikas Jain, co-founder, Micromax said, “It is heartening to see a bold move by our Prime Minister Mr. Narendra Modi towards demonetization of our economy. When a country of a billion people changes it will be a biggest historical change. In the next 50 days, we are going to witness a significant change in the payment habits of the consumers and as a leading handset player we are proud to be a frontrunner in facilitating this change. Our efforts started six months ago, when we started working with Transerv on our native wallet Udio to enable simplified digital solutions for our consumers . Very recently visa has also partnered with Micromax to bring mVisa to the Udio wallet. Natively users will be able to access the wallet and participate in the cashless economy. A mobile phone now becomes the centrepiece of all the activities consumers do and payment certainly has become one of the significant aspects to it. We truly believe that this change has to be brought in by strategic collaboration and commitment by all the industry players to bring mobile based payment solutions for the convenience of consumers.”