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Saturday, August 1, 2015

A digital/mobile wallet defeats the very purpose of money, and hence, it is not going to work in India, states Manish Patel, Founder and CEO of mobile point of sale (mPoS) company Mswipe.

E-wallet companies will further face serious challenges when mobile payment and digital wallet services such as Android Pay, Apple Pay and Samsung Pay become prevalent, he said in an interview with e27, soon after the company’s US$25 million Series C round from Falcon Edge Capital, Axis Bank, DSG Consumer Partners and others.

Not a big fan of e-wallet

“If you ask me, honestly all the limelight in India has been hogged by e-wallets. But I am not a big fan. It is not going to work in India because almost 60 per cent here are the banked population,” he says, in an apparent reference to Paytm, a leading mobile wallet-cum-m-commerce company in India. Paytm is backed by the likes of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group and SAIF Partners.

MobiKwik is another VC-funded mobile wallet company in India.

Also Read: Uber to invest US$1 billion in India over next nine months

“Even at a global level, (the) digital wallet has not taken off yet, despite huge mobile phone penetration. It is because e-wallet defeats the very purpose of money. It may work in markets such as Africa where majority of the population is underbanked. Digital wallet makes sense for them because they use it for P2P transactions,” he observes.

What is Mswipe?

Mswipe is a Mumbai-based merchant acquirer and mobile PoS solutions provider. It launched its first PoS solution in 2012 with a card reader, which could be attached to any mobile phone’s audio (headset) jack. Building on its product innovation strength, it launched the first EMV Chip and Pin compliant mobile PoS solution, Wisepad, in December 2013. In June the next year, Mswipe rolled out Wisepos, an Android phone which can be used for card payments.

Currently, Mswipe has 30,000 offline and online merchants in India using its services that include leading e-commerce players such as Myntra, Flipkart and Jabong. It also has merchant partners across Sri Lanka, Pakistan, South Africa, UAE and US.