Mahindra Comviva launches payPLUS Aadhaar Pay merchant payment acceptance solution

NEW DELHI: Mahindra Comviva said that it has launched payPLUS Aadhaar Pay, a merchant payment acceptance solution that leverages India Stack for merchant payments.

payPLUS Aadhaar Pay simplifies digital payments by using Aadhaar number and linked biometric credentials to facilitate merchant on-boarding and payments. Given the government’s focus on digital payments, payPLUS Aadhaar Pay provides a merchant acceptance solution designed for rural India taking into account the specific challenges faced by consumers and merchants in such demographic segments.

A comprehensive push towards digital India requires digitizing payments in rural India where the access to data infrastructure continuous to be a challenge plaguing the adoption of mobile based solutions. With only 13% of rural India connected to the internet, and the low financial inclusion ROI for banks, the digital payments revolution has not grown beyond urban centers of India. The challenge is not the unavailability of app in rural market but the availability of affordable digital payment solutions that works in a 2G environment.

payPLUS Aadhaar Pay takes a holistic view of the rural payments segment by providing Aadhaar enabled platform for onboarding rural merchants. It leverages India Stack APIs to allow quick and paperless merchant onboarding with Aadhaar and eKYC. It also allows rural customers to pay using their bank account linked with Aadhaar. In order to process payments, the customers provide their Aadhaar number to the merchant and authorize payment through their fingerprint. The solution requires a biometric device to be linked to merchant’s mobile phone for payment authentication; however, customers do not need the phone at all.

payPLUS Aadhaar Pay is a cloud based offering which empowers banks to launch a digital initiative at a low CAPEX and scale easily. It makes it extremely attractive for banks with the cost of transaction pegged at 5% of the alternative solutions like USSD and IVR.

Speaking on the launch, Srinivas Nidugondi, SVP and Head, Mobile Financial Solutions, Mahindra Comviva said “India’s digital payment initiative has the potential to bring massive social and economic transformation by formalizing the rural economy, which will not only help to bring the financially excluded into the mainstream economy but also help in generating new jobs and opportunities. However, we believe that the success of the digital India initiative would depend on the right ecosystem enablers being in place. We are very excited at the launch of payPLUS Aadhaar Pay because it has the potential to take the digital payments initiative to every village in India.”

Mahindra Comviva’s payPLUS empowers bank’s or acquirer’s merchant partners with a unified payment acceptance platform that enables the acceptance of any payment instrument such as Cards, Digital Wallets, UPI & mVisa across channels such as In-Store, App & Web thereby significantly reducing the barriers to adoption of these new technologies.

The merchant no longer has to remember multiple passwords across instruments, worry about new technology hitting the market or spends hours every day just checking sales across different digital instruments and channels. payPLUS offers a unified interface for merchants and acquiring entities to manage all instruments, channels and technologies through a single interface right from a mobile POS to new age wallets and the recent UPI & mVisa. payPLUS is geared to extract the most out of the recent policy changes with its merchant self-onboarding functionality which significantly lowers the onboarding cost and allows the merchant to start accepting payments by downloading the app.