 "Payment machines come of age with BonusHub")
Pran Mehra likes a good conversation. He sits upright in his chair, and fervently makes his point — often with great success. Just that during these dire times of demonetisation, when people are swarming banks and ATMs, he likes to talk that wee bit more. And, it’s difficult to fault him. Mehra has devoted most of his life carving a career out of digital payments services. Before embarking on a new entrepreneurial journey last year, Mehra spent a number of years heading the India business of Verifone, the American maker of technology for electronic payment transactions and point-of-sale (PoS) machines, as CEO.
“This was becoming a dabba,” he says, holding up a PoS machine in his hand while eating breakfast inside the coffee shop at The Imperial in New Delhi. By dabba, Mehra is alluding to the machine’s lack of versatility and sheer uselessness. “Everything around us is smart these days. The PoS machine, however, is just one-dimensional. It is way behind the times we live in,” says the 45-year-old. “It just seemed like something that was incapable of change.” Currently, more than 1.5 million PoS machines are in operation across the country.
Mehra set out to change all that in 2015, when he founded BonusHub, a digital payments platform that, he claims, has entrenched in it the kind of adaptability that will benefit all stakeholders involved: customers, merchants, banks and digital wallets. “BonusHub will help you to keep things simple and efficient. At the same time, it also looks at enriching customer experience,” says Mehra.
How it works
BonusHub, once configured into a PoS machine, essentially works like a mobile application. Once a merchant logs in, BonusHub allows you the luxury of — apart from using your credit or debit card — making a payment through a variety of digital wallets, which all come pre-loaded on BonusHub. So far, Mehra has managed to get 16 participating issuers on board, including MobiKwik, Oxigen, Airtel Money, SBI Buddy and Idea Money.
Paytm, the market leader in the digital payment segment, has stayed away so far. But Mehra expects that to change.
Also Read
“Right now, we’ve just started out. Hopefully, we can get Paytm on board as well,” adds Mehra.
A recent study by Assocham-RNCOS, called “Indian m-wallet market: Forecast 2022”, predicts that the market size of mobile wallets by 2022 will be worth a mind-boggling Rs 30,000 crore. Currently, that figure is only pegged at Rs 154 crore.
“While we were developing this, we realised that the payment methods in India were evolving all the time, and the customers wanted more payment choices. This will help more people to go cashless,” says Mehra. As for the issuers, there is so much competition in the market and everyone wants to get noticed. BonusHub gives them that platform.”
In some ways, BonusHub is an aggregator for mobile wallets just like the app, Plutus, is for Pine Labs, another payments solutions company. Just that Plutus doesn’t feature wallets — instead it focuses on real-time access to transaction data, and helping vendors locate other Pine Labs users around them.
Along with digital wallets, BonusHub will also allow customers to pay via unified payment interface (UPI) through Bonus QR, which can also come in useful for buyers who like to use mVisa and MasterPass. “Seldom do places offer the option of UPI. But more people are bound to use this now,” says Mehra. UPI, an initiative of the National Payments Corporation of India and the Reserve Bank of India, allows direct transactions between two bank accounts through a single mobile application.
A cost-efficient proposition
More intriguingly, Mehra says that he has had to invest little in this product. “My cost is only the technology. The marketing cost and the entire rollout of the product is the responsibility of the banks.” Currently, Mehra only has a small group that is a part of this project: 10-15 people, some of them industry veterans.
BonusHub has agreed terms with one bank and is in the middle of concluding talks with another. Mehra expects BonusHub to be on 10,000-15,000 terminals in the next couple of weeks. A BonusHub-enabled terminal, he adds, provides much-needed dynamism to the transaction that takes place between a vendor and a customer.
The mode of revenue seems simple: BonusHub will have a direct agreement with banks, with the two parties settling on a fee-split ratio. Over the next few months, Mehra hopes to add at least five or six big banks to the BonusHub kitty.
Perhaps the most interesting of Mehra’s innovations is Bonus Groups, an application that lets a group of people pay collectively for an amount. “The most simple example for Bonus Groups is a restaurant bill. Each person can pay his share through the app —without swiping different cards,” says Mehra. The number of people in the Bonus Group can be deducted or added according to your convenience. “This is for those people who, apart from their own share, also have to pay for others,” he laughs.