98% of retailers in India accept Digital Payments embarking their Digital Transformation journey

MediaTek powered innovation has a key role to play in taking off digital payments among retailers in India.  The sound box payment system adds to transparency as well as eliminates the barriers of literacy helping in the widespread adoption of digital payment systems across retailers in Bharat.

Gurugram – The India opportunity of digital transformation, which is different and unique in scale and implementation, opens up immense opportunity for innovation.  Retail is one of the forthcoming sectors witnessing digital transformation across the globe.  Emerging technologies and developing concepts including mixed reality, artificial intelligence, smart kiosks, conversational computing are a few examples that are transforming the entire retail experiences.

India’s digital transformation opportunity in retail is one of the largest in the world.  The retail sector alone should cross $2 trillion by 2030, out of which more than half will be organised retail.  One of the key pillars of the organised retail will be adoption of various technologies reinforcing the digital transformation of the sector.

The large, organised retail has already embarked some level of digital transformation in India.  Some of them have started exploring how AI, IoT and other technologies can be leveraged to elate the customer experience.  This is also happening on the backdrop of ever-growing e-commerce, which has successfully started consumers getting used to technology. 

But to bring a real high impact difference in any sector in India, the adoption in the mass segment is critical.  The un-organised / semi-organised retail in India is 89% which consists of community stores, street vendors, bazaars, mandis among other traditional formats of retail in the country. The good news is that the digital transformation seeds have already been sown in a large section of unorganised / semi-organised retail in India.

Accepting digital payments leads various solutions that retailers in India are leveraging marking their digital journey.  While factors like nationwide availability of 4G services after 2017, launch of UPI, and promotion of contactless payment modes during covid-19 emerge as key factors driving this behaviourial change, the innovation introduced by Paytm in the form of soundbox powered by MediaTek is considered as a pathbreaking solution that has increased the confidence of retailers in the digital payments.

Faisal Kawoosa, Chief Analyst & Founder, Techarc sharing more on this said, “There was a mismatch in the level of understanding and awareness of digital payment systems between consumers and the merchant, especially the roadside shops and street vendors, which is a significant part of Bharat’s retail.  This gap resulted in lack of confidence, trust and transparency among the two parties to complete a transaction.  MediaTek powered Soundbox introduced by Paytm and later followed by other payment systems created a level’s play field making digital payment as the default mode of payment across retailers in the country.”

Read the entire report with interesting retail digital transformation of Bharat insights.

Way forward

Retail is one of the booming sectors in India.  India’s retail is 4^th largest in the world and is already contributing over 10% of the GDP.  The transition to modern retail especially in the mass segments of retail encompassing traditional formats of retail like bazaars, mandis, roadside shops, karts, etc., usher immense potential for technology driven by innovative solutions where strong collaborations with technology providers like MediaTek will be instrumental.  As a company, MediaTek has helped massify several key technologies in India and globally including smartphones.

As India embarks Atmanirbharta and we see a number of startups coming up with India centric solutions, the collaboration with technology providers like MediaTek will be of immense importance in accelerating the pace along with universalisation of solutions which can also be exported to global markets.  With India already championing digital technologies globally by promoting digital public infrastructure along with the recent announcement of GDPIR as part of her G20 stewardship, such powerful scalable and sustainable solutions for the digital transformation of retail and other sectors will help increase India’s contribution towards digital transformation happening globally.