Small cash is a big deal

The micro-ATM channel has held its own despite growth in digital payments and pricing not being raised

- RAGHU MOHAN

"We want to be the Blinkit of cash delivery," says Suneel Aiyer, mentor and advisory board member at PocketATM. Its business model: Put idle cash in kiranas' tills back into play. Assume you want ₹2,000 in cash, you flash a QR code at the outlet; your account is debited and cash is handed over. A matching credit entry is made in the merchant's account. The clever part here is not PocketATM's idea but that it has cottoned on and seeks to breathe life into a long-forgotten circular issued by the National Payments Corporation of India (March 16, 2020): 'Withdrawal of cash over UPI at merchant locations. Aiyer, the former chief executive officer (CEO) of Writer Safeguard (a cash logistics firm since being acquired by Hitachi Payments), wants to "hyper-localise cash-in-circulation (CIC) and up its velocity; and reduce logistics costs by doing away with the need to send cash to banks for sorting and bundling in the case of ATMs."

This calls attention to micro-ATMs: Devices akin to point-of-sale (POS) terminals used by banks' business correspondents (BCs); think of these as miniaturised handheld ATMs. "The biggest advantage of micro-ATMs is they not only take care of the issue of low ATM penetration but CiC gets recycled faster. While we are not in this business, we indirectly facilitate in the case of retailers who happen to be BCs," says Ketan Patel, CEO of Mswipe Technologies (the largest deployer of PoS units). It also happens to be a trade which is largely below the radar as it is not glamorous.