Page 32 - Banking Finance June 2017

INTERVIEW

there is huge scope for mobile to drive real social and eco- solution to cost cutting and reduction of money spent in
nomic change around the world. maintaining a cash economy.
India has 25 crore families and close to 50 crore people earn The digital payment spectrum eliminates the cost of han-
dling physical cash and the amount of money
“ ToneTag has filed 17 global patents to build great spent in printing the same. No paper trails,
use cases and excitement in payments as well as receipts, ledgers, account books etc. it is all
stored digitally and efficiently.
offline retail space
“
What has been your performance in
in cash. Amongst the cash-earning customers, more than last financial year and what targets you have set
30 crores are new bank account customers, mostly PMJDY for coming year.
accounts, enrolled through a unique KYC & authentication With its strategic partnerships, ToneTag technology has
infrastructure of Aadhaar. And the increasingly large per- reached 32 million consumers and 70,000 merchant devices
centage of the customer, close to 20 crores right now and
and the number is expected to cross 100 million by end of
expected to be 60 crores by 2020, amongst them equipped this year. 4000 computer POS made contactless in a day with
with smartphones. Also, we expect that some amongst the ToneTag SDK push.
target customer segment, 50 crores today, will move to earn
ToneTag has filed 17 global patents to build great use cases
and spend electronically, however, there will be others who
will continue to earn in cash. It is extremely important to and excitement in payments as well as offline retail space.
ensure that customer earning in cash, which is about 80% With a controlled cohort, ToneTag technology has brought
of the working population in India today, starts to spend 83% customer stickiness for our partners without any
electronically. incentivisation.
Our technology is running live with major brands and busi-
From these numbers, it is imperative that mobile payments
are the way forward and digitization is unavoidable. Gov- nesses across the country like Airtel, Freecharge, YesBank,
ernments push for Aadhar Pay and a cashless economy is ICICI Pockets and ShoppersStop.
encouraging as it shows their interest and vision is in sync What has been the growth in POS Sale after
with what we want to accomplish.
Demonetisation?
How far is the digital payment system secure? We are seeing a behavioural change in merchants and cus-
Digitization is the way forward, but there are few security tomers and these trends will be a sustained change in the
breaches which the world is facing today in digital payments. long run. The increase in demand for POS and EDC machines
There are many technologies working globally to completely has been steady and encouraging. Recent RBI stats tell us
eliminate any security risk with digital payments. that the number of POS machines deployed by the banks
alone have reached about 3 crores in number.
One of such technologies is ToneTag sound wave technol-
ogy. With ToneTag technology digital payments are at its This mainly due to the encouragement from banks and
safest, as the data and transaction information are en- the government. Removal of MDR and taxes on POS
crypted from end to end. machines. T

The ToneTag software algorithm encodes data into sound About Mr. Kumar Abhishek
waves, which is protected with 3-layers of encryption,
blockchain technology, and tokenization, delivering secure, Kumar brings extensive experience on large scale, multi
country, core banking implementations both on mobile and
contactless payment experience over existing infrastructure.
internet banking arenas. He aspires to enable financial
How much cost effective is the digital payment inclusion to the grass root level In 2013, Kumar conceptu-
alized the idea of ToneTag and developed a unique concept
system?
of making offline payments and eliminating hardware de-
As we stand, digital payment system infrastructure is still pendency.
developing in the country. Upgradation of this may cost a
In addition to his business activities in the entrepreneurs
bit but digital payments are inexpensive when compared
cash based payments. Digital payments are the long-term space, he likes playing Golf and the Saxophone.

32 | 2017 | JUNE | BANKING FINANCE

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