Small, Growing Businesses and Employment

This learning note unpacks the barriers and opportunities for improving women’s adoption of digital payment solutions, based on an experiment conducted as part of the Catalyst program in Jaipur. The intervention sought to improve women’s access to formal financial services … Read More

This brief presents findings from a scoping study conducted with self-employed women from low-income households, to identify individual and household-level barriers to greater adoption of digital financial services. 

In this field story, a milk booth operator shares his experience of transitioning from cash to digital payments using a smartphone, as part of Catalyst’s payment digitisation pilot in Jaipur. 

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 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

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

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

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

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 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