Small, Growing Businesses and Employment

Why I Tried Digital – A Dairy Distributor’s Story

Catalyst

In this field story, a dairy distributor talks about the challenges and pain points in operating in a cash-intensive ecosystem and shares his experience in transacting using a UPI platform as part of Catalyst’s pilot in Jaipur. 

Paybee: Let’s Buzz Payments

Catalyst

PayBee is a UPI-based payments platform that digitizes B2B payments across all verticals in the market, with a focus on the dairy, FMCG, and pharma sectors. This field story captures operational insights and challenges from Paybee’s experience in digitizing payments … Read More

Digitizing Dairy B2B Supply Chain: Experience from the Field

Tunisha Kapoor, Preethi Rao

This note presents learnings from Catalyst’s pilot to digitise the B2B supply chain of Saras Dairy in Jaipur. The pilot project was identified as a potential use case with a strong business value proposition for all stakeholders and an opportunity … Read More

Digitising Khatta System – Journey of MeraPaper

Catalyst

The field story illustrates how the founders of Merapaper, an innovative mobile application, conceived the idea for the application and took it from ideation to implementation. The application aims to revolutionise the time-intensive, cash dependent and high frequency payment collection … Read More

Building Hooks and Ladders: A Case for Integrating Digital Payments and Lending to Small Merchants

John Arun, Ankur Gautam

This report presents insights from a study conducted for informing the credit operations of the Catalyst initiative at IFMR. The scoping study was commissioned for assessing the credit needs of micromerchants and understanding whether credit products can be used as … Read More

Mapping the Merchant’s Mind: An Analysis of Digital Payment Behaviors by Fixed Store Merchants in Jaipur

Badal Malick, Rajesh Shukla, Megha Shree, Vaisnavi Gnanasekaran, Pratibha Joshi, Harsh Nisar

This report by Catalyst and People Research on India’s Consumer Economy (PRICE) provides a deeper context on small business profiles, infrastructure, needs, behaviors, and perceptions based on a large sample survey. The study focuses on small merchants with fixed establishments, … Read More

PayNearby: Towards a Hyperlocal Fintech Network

Catalyst

PayNearby is a start-up that aims to create the world’s largest hyperlocal fintech network in India, by enabling existing corner shops to become digital financial service hubs. In this piece, co-founder Anand Bajaj shares Paynearby’s experience in working with micro-merchants … Read More

FINGPAY: Fostering Bare-pocket Transactions

Catalyst

Fingpay, a biometrics-based payments platform, seeks to facilitate seamless transactions without the need for customers to carry cash, cards, or phones on them. In this piece, co-founder of Fingpay, Pratyush Halen, shares insights from Fingpay’s journey in digitising payments using … Read More

In BHIM We Trust

Catalyst

This field story captures the experience of small merchants in adopting and using the BHIM UPI application. Merchants were onboarded to the BHIM QR code platform as part of Catalyst’s experiments to test strategies for enabling digital payment adoption in … Read More

Unlocking Finance for Small Merchants – from Digital Data to Digital Credit

Catalyst

Digitizing merchant can payments generate data trails that can be used by financial service provider to assess the credit worthiness of small merchants. This field story captures insights from a Catalyst experiment in which micromerchants were provided with a Point … Read More