Pine Labs is keen on catering to the online business needs of small and medium-sized enterprises, says Online and Omnichannel Business Head Tanya Mohan Naik.
“As and when we rollout for smaller merchants, we need to up the way we are servicing our customers. They (small merchants) are more DIY (Do it Yourself) and they do not really need high touch when it comes to online,” Naik said.
“We are sometime away from there but we definitely have those plans,” she added.
Apart from this, the merchant commerce platform is utilising Qfix Infocomm’s (Qfix) platform to enable schools in tier-2 and tier-3 cities to collect fees. Pine Labs had announced the acquisition of the Mumbai-based online payment start-up Qfix in February.
“As the education levels rise, the school fees have also risen. We are providing multiple avenues to parents to be able to split the fees into multiple instalments while not impacting the school cash flow,” Naik said.
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“So EMI (Equated Monthly Installment) and Pay later is also a very important requirement for them. Because of our existing partnership with HDFC Bank, we have been able to grow that book as well.”
Founded in 1998, Noida-based Pine Labs has gained prominence for providing point-of sale machines to offline merchants for card transactions. In October 2021, it made its foray into the online payments space with Plural, a suite of online payment products.
Plural Gateway, Plural Checkout, and Plural Console are the three key products available under the Plural brand.
Plural Gateway is a payment gateway that allows multiple modes of payment, including buy now pay later transactions. Plural Checkout aims to make payment checkouts faster for Android and iOS users.
On the other hand, Plural Console enables the integration of multiple payment gateways in a merchant’s business technology stack. It currently supports more than six payment gateways and 10 payment methods.
Currently, Plural processes transactions worth $380 million on a monthly basis. Pine Labs expects the value of transactions to grow by 10-15 times in the next two years, thereby taking the monthly transaction value to $4-5 billion.
Currently, less than 10% of Pine Labs’ overall transaction volume comes from the online business.
“I do believe that in the next two years, we (online business) would be at least 25-50% of what the offline volumes are for Pine Labs today,” Naik said.
