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Innovative Digital Payment Business Models for Small Merchants and Low-income Households

While the adoption of digital financial services has increased significantly in India in recent years, there exist significant gaps in reaching out to the last mile. Micro-merchants and low-income households, in particular, remain an under-served segment. As part of our Catalyst initiative, LEAD hosted a workshop at the Inclusive Finance India Summit, 2018. The session brought together practitioners, policy influencers, and financial service providers.

The closed-door session focused on ‘Innovative Digital Payment Business Models for Small Merchants and Low-income Households’. Facilitated by Jayshree Venkatesan (Financial Sector Specialist) and Ayush Chauhan (Design Strategy and Innovation Specialist), the session brought for key principles on how to responsibly transition small business ecosystems (i.e. merchants, low income customers, suppliers) to a digital payment platform.

It showcased learnings from a series of interventions undertaken by Catalyst in Jaipur across the low-income ecosystems to understand the opportunities for digitizing payments. The speakers presented major insights from four types of business models: Distributors and their merchant networks in dairy, pharmaceutical, and FMCG supply chains, low-income households in urban slums, payment collections for subscription-based services, and, fixed store and kirana merchants.