A lot of money is flowing into making 'smart' billing machines in India

• Point-of-Sale startup Mswipe has raised $30 million and now plans to acquire 1.5 million merchants by 2020.
• The Indian PoS market has been fast-growing with even the likes of Amazon, Google expanding to offline markets.
• The focus now is on building technology-driven devices or apps that will make way for smart billing systems.
• Poynt, a smart terminal which has been founded by the creator of Google Wallet Osama Bedier, too is looking to enter India.

The Indian government has set ambitious goals for the country to become a cashless economy. And pushing forward this digitisation are point-of-sale terminals or portable billing machines.

Now, PoS startup Mswipe, has raised $30 million in a series E round with plans to sign up 1.5 million merchants by FY 2020.

Mumbai-based Mswipe, which raked in ₹1.42 billion in revenue post demonetisation in the year 2016-17, has been possibly one of the biggest beneficiaries of the note ban apart from Paytm. The cost of a Mswipe machine starts at ₹1,500.

The 7-year-old startup also appears to be gearing up for competition. Be it the Indian competitor Payswifff or US-based Poynt. Poynt – a smart terminal which is the brainchild of Osama Bedier, the creator of Google Wallet – is also looking at India as an ideal market. Poynt, as Bedier likes to call as the ‘Android’ for digital payments.

But the focus now has to be on technology. Mswipe is developing its technology with the introduction of WisePoS, a smart billing machine that will enable retailers to run multiple applications on them including billing, inventory management and supply chain along with integrated payments. It is also currently piloting the MoneyStore, an app store for payment productivity apps.

“Tech powered products will add significant value to merchants including an app-based ecosystem to help our merchant partners beyond payments. We are big believers in offering merchants access to a merchant-friendly cost-effective open ecosystem,” said Manish Patel, founder and CEO, Mswipe.

Meanwhile, Poynt offers an open operating system that can power any smart payment terminal worldwide.

“300 million smart payment devices will exist in the next five years. 50 million of those will be in India. These devices will be responsible for at least half of the world’s commerce. If these devices are changed to computing devices, the software that runs on those that will be a trillion dollar business. In an app store model, where you take 10 or 20% just to distribute that, that itself is a $200 billion business,” Bedier told Business Insider in an earlier interview.

This market opportunity is not missed by the big players – Amazon, Google – who are all rushing to have a pie of the offline payments market.

It’s India’s bullish move to be a cashless economy that has empowered the presence of these PoS terminals. According to RBI report from January 2019, PoS terminals from banks alone go up to over 36 lakhs in India.

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