I visited India a few times in the last 9 months after digital payments had taken off due to COVID and can attest that these have been game changers that have led shopkeeps to accept e-payments.
More than anything to do with literacy, this basically allows Shopkeeper to keep doing what they are doing without fiddling with their phones etc to confirm they received money. The device just says the amount received out loud and at that point, the customer can leave with the goods. Haven't seen this tech anywhere else.
In my latest trip, I don't believe I paid cash in any shop and I was in a second tier city the whole time, not one of the big metropolitan cities.
> In my latest trip, I don't believe I paid cash in any shop and I was in a second tier city the whole time, not one of the big metropolitan cities.
If you’re a tourist or business visitor, this isn’t possible. UPI isn’t available to you. Also note that many smaller shops which accept cards and do accept India-issued MasterCard/Visa/Rupay won’t take MC/Visa issued abroad, because their payment providers charge them extra.
Digital payments for business visitors and tourists in India are pretty terrible outside of upscale places.
If you’re an Indian living abroad, for now, you need to keep an Indian phone number active to use UPI (this should change soon). You can use cards though, especially if you have an India-issued card — those have much wider acceptance.
Just to add to this, digital payments in India got popular well before COVID, significantly increasing after the demonetization charade (which imo was a bad decision and total chaos).
I sometimes go weeks without realizing that I have literally zero cash in my wallet.
I was using UPI so much that my credit card usage had dropped to almost nothing. Literally had to force myself to use the credit card more to accumulate some rewards.
After reading this article so much makes sense. I’m currently at the end of my annual trip here seeing family and I have been hearing these things all over the shop.
I didn’t pay much thought to it until now if I am honest. Genius and great to see tech companies do something to actually help people solve real world problems.
> The device just says the amount received out loud and at that point, the customer can leave with the goods. Haven't seen this tech anywhere else.
I’ve seen this in China many years ago on both PoS terminals and smartphones. Guess it shouldn’t be surprising that Paytm brought this to India, given that Alibaba/Ant Financial at one point had a significant stake in it.
This role is played by the smart phones in China. The customers pay by scanning the printed QR code, and upon success, the WeChat or Alipay app on the vendor's phone reads out the amount loud.
It's amazing how fintech can create actual value when they aren't all just fighting over who gets to salami slice a nation's commerce!
> Digital payments have taken off in a big way in India in recent years due to the government’s unified payments interface (UPI)... But this boom hasn’t helped fintech companies in India as they do not make money from facilitating UPI transactions.
Literacy rates in India look to be ~80% and climbing about 1% per year. Obviously it'll reach an asymptote, but it's looking like India already surpasses the US in this regard. Of course, given the large population, more Indians are illiterate than there are people in almost every nation. Nonetheless, wouldn't this solution be quite niche?
I've interacted with several vendors who use these sound boxes. The article is a bit misleading in the sense that illiteracy is not the primary driver of the usage of these devices. It is a better check-out experience. Vendors were busy and annoyed by the fact that they have to use their phone to confirm payments which often hindered them from doing their routine to sell more stuff. Think about vendors making street foods, actively selling vegetables, etc.
Now all they have to do is listen to the confirmation, directly streamed from the payment gateway vendor's server as soon as receive the money. Minor convenience, agreed, but the service isn't expensive to run (thanks to the minimal hardware it needs and the low data prices in India) and surprisingly even small vendors are okay with paying a subscription fee for it.
> it's looking like India already surpasses the US in this regard
Different standards. India is measuring base literacy, being able to
"read and write with understanding a short simple statement about their everyday life" [1]. The comparable counter-statistic in the U.S. is Level 1 illiteracy, or being able to "unable to successfully determine the meaning of sentences, read relatively short texts to locate a single piece of information, or complete simple forms" in English [2]. That figure is 4.1%. (A Spanish-speaking physics PhD would count.)
I thought you were joking about India surpassing the US in literacy rates, and then I looked it up. It's 75 - 85% depending on how you count. What?!
How is this number not 99.9%? Developed countries are at 100% or minus rounding error. Even Canada is at 99%, and that's next door. What is going on in the US?
There is more going on here than literacy. Even if you are illiterate, if you tell someone to pay 10 rupees you could see if 10 rupees made it to your account.
Do those vendors not have smartphones? That's what I am suspecting. If they did, an app could announce it and you wouldn't need the external speaker.
The speakers seem to be directly connected to the cellular network. And rented for ridiculously small fees.
But it's good that there are options. Many of us aged 40+ can't read HN-sized text anymore, and the prevalence of presbyopia among UI designers is evidently 0%. Throw in glare from sunlight, a busy storefront where you constantly need your hands and eyes elsewhere, etc.
Africa is possibly another target. Its literacy rates are a little bit under India's, and it's another place where digital payments have gone big, even earlier than India.
20% (~300M) illiterate skews old, higher % of whom are active in workforce and will be for decades. Not that ~300M is "niche" as you said, but think of it technology that helps 50% of the workforce vs 20% of population.
Not mentioned in the article but I asked a shopkeeper why they use it. Answer is fraud. Earlier, customers would download a "fake" app, which miciked online gateway's UI. Customer would punch in money, and show to shopkeeper that "payment went through". Customer takes goods with them and leaves. Shopkeeper looses money.
With this sound box, shopkeeper gives goods ONLY after the box makes sound. Now imagine if a elderly or illiterate relative of shopowner is manning the shop. They may not know how to operate their "banking" app to make sure money has reached. The sound box removes that problem.
"Fraud" is too friendly a word for this. It's just theft from a person who probably is having a much harder time making ends meet than the person stealing. Theft is never a pleasant topic but stealing from somebody with much less financial means than you is morally bankrupt.
> Balwant Singh, 32, runs a grocery store in New Delhi with his mother. He bought a Paytm Soundbox in 2020 after realizing digital payment receipts could be doctored. “[Before sound boxes], people were using apps to create fake payment receipts. I got conned a few times,” he told Rest of World.
The soundbox does seem useful. What you mentioned is all in the article.
> Abbas Ali, a vegetable vendor in an upscale neighborhood in New Delhi, started accepting digital payments in 2021. But every time a customer paid online, the 48-year-old, who can neither read nor write, would need to call his son to confirm that the payment had been received.
Another thing that helps this boom is, in India no one has any problem in sharing their phone number with strangers. Delivery workers, Cab drivers, Restaurant waitlist, you name it. So payment send and receive with just mobile number as the primary key becomes easier.
Wow not true at all, everybody hesitates to bring forced to give mobile number at the supermarket it cloth stores for no good reason than to feed into FB/Google in bulk.
For paying a bill you're just scanning the QR most of the time, it's only P2P like cabs/autos when you may have to scan the drivers personal QR. Gpay & others apart from BHIM tend to already generate or allow alphanumeric UPI ID.
This is one of the most unique things about India that I haven't seen in any other country - the openness and community between its citizens. Especially proud to be Indian!
There is also Virtual Payment Address (VPA) attached to account wiht legit number and bank acct which is good enough to use (share /scan QR code ) with merchant/user name.
I was going to comment on this post wondering how it's more efficient than just the merchant looking at a fixed screen which shows the incoming transactions.
But the video demonstrates why the audio interface is better, it allows them to multi-task. Sort of like how listening to radio/podcasts doesn't tie you down to somewhere like watching the TV does.
They talk about how sometimes people would show them doctored receipts to scam them- how much longer before people start recording the "Paid Rs 50" voice and playing it back off their phones?
Not sure what the fix for that would be- reading off the time/date, a small integrated display, or maybe it's just not an issue.
This speaker is with the merchant. I am sure the merchant can distinguish between a sound coming from their speaker vs sound coming from someone's mobile.
The vendor being able to instantly take out a loan is the real kicker here. If even a relatively small percentage of shopkeepers do this it will enable economic growth only seen in places like China in the 1990s, the effect will be multiplicative throughout the economy
I was so happy to read that part. A triumph of capitalism, if it takes off.
Everyone deserves the right to a fair and quick evaluation of their default risk to get access to capital on margin. It’s the best way to get people to invest in themselves and their communities.
> Six months after subscribing, Singh received an instant loan of 3 lakh rupees (around $3,600) from Paytm. He used the money to add more products to his store. “I had never thought of taking up a loan since it involves lots of paperwork and could take months to get processed. Here, I got it instantly so I took it up,” he said. After he paid it off, Singh took another loan from Paytm for 5 lakh rupees (around $6,000).
This a brilliant strategy for generating proof of financial transactions and thus making small businesses eligible for credit.
Am I crazy here? If you're buying a device, why not buy an EFTPOS (credit card/touch pay) machine that facilitates the transaction?
Is Google/Apple Pay not prevelant in India? Given they're paying by their phone, surely it is?
I feel like I'm missing something here, this method seems more complex than the now standard "tap your phone on the machine" in my country. The banks give them out for free or a small fee (they take a fee per transaction) or the vendors use a third party like Square.
The reason could because of how these payments apps evolved.
People already had cheap android phones in their hand. After the 4g boom, many got their first smartphone.
UPI related playment apps started with QR code scanning, just like in China.
There is no extra cost to the vendor. All they need is a sticker with their QR, which customers can scan. Later, they came up with a (bluetooth) speaker which can announce payments. It doesn't even need a connected smartphone.
If they used cards, they need to manufacture it and the readers. Ship them to their home addresses (which is complicated and lossy), train them about card usage.
For many vendors who accepted UPI payments, it was their first time accepting something other than cash as payments.
The tap & pay model is an extension of payment using credit cards which has been the preferred payment method in the west for decades. On the other hand, credit cards never caught on in India, specially among the middle and lower middle class folks which is a large chunk of the population. So while the west underwent evolution from paper currency to credit cards to digital payments, India skipped the credit card generation and went straight for digital payments thanks to cheap android phones and free/subsidized/cheap 3G/4G data costs.
Sounds very much like the Vipps system we have in Scandinavia, particularly Norway, with the addition of something like the Android Voice Notify app which reads Android notification. My mobile phone has been doing this for years. Whenever I receive a payment it reads it out to me. No need for any new devices.
Is it a crazy suggestion that you could put a display on the smart speaker and teach a small subset of literacy for them to see what is being said?
Could someone learn a small amount that way?
I've seen countless stories of people who come to the US and learn some english by watching TV with the close captions turned on, has to work elsewhere?
I remember seeing these at vegetable stands and thinking it was a goofy shopkeeper quirk, didn't realize how useful of a feature this was to shopkeepers. Kudos to PayTM for a very good solution to speeding up digital payments across society
i can see how this might seem like a foreign idea for a speaker to announce how much you spent in a store to everyone nearby. but in practice, for small neighbourhood stores, this is just fine. a good implementation of hdi.
[+] [-] sfifs|3 years ago|reply
More than anything to do with literacy, this basically allows Shopkeeper to keep doing what they are doing without fiddling with their phones etc to confirm they received money. The device just says the amount received out loud and at that point, the customer can leave with the goods. Haven't seen this tech anywhere else.
In my latest trip, I don't believe I paid cash in any shop and I was in a second tier city the whole time, not one of the big metropolitan cities.
[+] [-] signal11|3 years ago|reply
If you’re a tourist or business visitor, this isn’t possible. UPI isn’t available to you. Also note that many smaller shops which accept cards and do accept India-issued MasterCard/Visa/Rupay won’t take MC/Visa issued abroad, because their payment providers charge them extra.
Digital payments for business visitors and tourists in India are pretty terrible outside of upscale places.
If you’re an Indian living abroad, for now, you need to keep an Indian phone number active to use UPI (this should change soon). You can use cards though, especially if you have an India-issued card — those have much wider acceptance.
[+] [-] alsodumb|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spaceman_2020|3 years ago|reply
I was using UPI so much that my credit card usage had dropped to almost nothing. Literally had to force myself to use the credit card more to accumulate some rewards.
[+] [-] makingstuffs|3 years ago|reply
I didn’t pay much thought to it until now if I am honest. Genius and great to see tech companies do something to actually help people solve real world problems.
[+] [-] hedora|3 years ago|reply
It suggests having a tv-like display would work about as well, and be less noisy / distracting.
[+] [-] oefrha|3 years ago|reply
I’ve seen this in China many years ago on both PoS terminals and smartphones. Guess it shouldn’t be surprising that Paytm brought this to India, given that Alibaba/Ant Financial at one point had a significant stake in it.
[+] [-] merlinran|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] user_named|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lxgr|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jjoonathan|3 years ago|reply
> Digital payments have taken off in a big way in India in recent years due to the government’s unified payments interface (UPI)... But this boom hasn’t helped fintech companies in India as they do not make money from facilitating UPI transactions.
[+] [-] flerchin|3 years ago|reply
Source: https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/IND/india/literacy-rat...
[+] [-] alsodumb|3 years ago|reply
Now all they have to do is listen to the confirmation, directly streamed from the payment gateway vendor's server as soon as receive the money. Minor convenience, agreed, but the service isn't expensive to run (thanks to the minimal hardware it needs and the low data prices in India) and surprisingly even small vendors are okay with paying a subscription fee for it.
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|3 years ago|reply
Different standards. India is measuring base literacy, being able to "read and write with understanding a short simple statement about their everyday life" [1]. The comparable counter-statistic in the U.S. is Level 1 illiteracy, or being able to "unable to successfully determine the meaning of sentences, read relatively short texts to locate a single piece of information, or complete simple forms" in English [2]. That figure is 4.1%. (A Spanish-speaking physics PhD would count.)
[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/IND/india/literacy-rat...
[2] https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179.pdf
[+] [-] t8sr|3 years ago|reply
How is this number not 99.9%? Developed countries are at 100% or minus rounding error. Even Canada is at 99%, and that's next door. What is going on in the US?
[+] [-] swamp40|3 years ago|reply
Do those vendors not have smartphones? That's what I am suspecting. If they did, an app could announce it and you wouldn't need the external speaker.
The speakers seem to be directly connected to the cellular network. And rented for ridiculously small fees.
[+] [-] sowbug|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aatharuv|3 years ago|reply
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/SSF/sub-saharan-africa...
[+] [-] dirtyid|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CyberDildonics|3 years ago|reply
I think you mean the increase will level off.
An "asymptote" would mean it is always getting closer to some target number, and there is no reason that would be 'obviously' true.
[+] [-] throwaway280382|3 years ago|reply
With this sound box, shopkeeper gives goods ONLY after the box makes sound. Now imagine if a elderly or illiterate relative of shopowner is manning the shop. They may not know how to operate their "banking" app to make sure money has reached. The sound box removes that problem.
[+] [-] kylehotchkiss|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rexf|3 years ago|reply
> Balwant Singh, 32, runs a grocery store in New Delhi with his mother. He bought a Paytm Soundbox in 2020 after realizing digital payment receipts could be doctored. “[Before sound boxes], people were using apps to create fake payment receipts. I got conned a few times,” he told Rest of World.
The soundbox does seem useful. What you mentioned is all in the article.
> Abbas Ali, a vegetable vendor in an upscale neighborhood in New Delhi, started accepting digital payments in 2021. But every time a customer paid online, the 48-year-old, who can neither read nor write, would need to call his son to confirm that the payment had been received.
[+] [-] rkrishnaan|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] villgax|3 years ago|reply
For paying a bill you're just scanning the QR most of the time, it's only P2P like cabs/autos when you may have to scan the drivers personal QR. Gpay & others apart from BHIM tend to already generate or allow alphanumeric UPI ID.
[+] [-] Freedom2|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hipratham|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eru|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryzvonusef|3 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUR84Qz0KbM
[+] [-] djhworld|3 years ago|reply
I was going to comment on this post wondering how it's more efficient than just the merchant looking at a fixed screen which shows the incoming transactions.
But the video demonstrates why the audio interface is better, it allows them to multi-task. Sort of like how listening to radio/podcasts doesn't tie you down to somewhere like watching the TV does.
[+] [-] ape4|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] evan_|3 years ago|reply
Not sure what the fix for that would be- reading off the time/date, a small integrated display, or maybe it's just not an issue.
[+] [-] jatins|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jack_riminton|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WeylandYutani|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kridsdale1|3 years ago|reply
Everyone deserves the right to a fair and quick evaluation of their default risk to get access to capital on margin. It’s the best way to get people to invest in themselves and their communities.
[+] [-] tony_antony|3 years ago|reply
This a brilliant strategy for generating proof of financial transactions and thus making small businesses eligible for credit.
[+] [-] TheHappyOddish|3 years ago|reply
Is Google/Apple Pay not prevelant in India? Given they're paying by their phone, surely it is?
I feel like I'm missing something here, this method seems more complex than the now standard "tap your phone on the machine" in my country. The banks give them out for free or a small fee (they take a fee per transaction) or the vendors use a third party like Square.
[+] [-] tpreetham|3 years ago|reply
People already had cheap android phones in their hand. After the 4g boom, many got their first smartphone.
UPI related playment apps started with QR code scanning, just like in China.
There is no extra cost to the vendor. All they need is a sticker with their QR, which customers can scan. Later, they came up with a (bluetooth) speaker which can announce payments. It doesn't even need a connected smartphone.
If they used cards, they need to manufacture it and the readers. Ship them to their home addresses (which is complicated and lossy), train them about card usage.
For many vendors who accepted UPI payments, it was their first time accepting something other than cash as payments.
[+] [-] pwn0|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] penguin_booze|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kwhitefoot|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ck2|3 years ago|reply
Could someone learn a small amount that way?
I've seen countless stories of people who come to the US and learn some english by watching TV with the close captions turned on, has to work elsewhere?
[+] [-] kylehotchkiss|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] creatonez|3 years ago|reply
Edit: For some reason it's mentioned nowhere in the article, but it's because these are cryptocurrency transactions
[+] [-] villgax|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rldjbpin|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asdted|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bobse|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] known|3 years ago|reply
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