The recent currency demonetisation announcement has fuelled many mobile wallet companies to drive Indians to adopt digital payments and thus accelerate away from cash to other alternatives. Not only will consumers adopt e-wallets, but a strong pull is seen today coming from small merchants, especially those who do not have a credit, debit card or POS machines.

To access any electronic payment platform, all you need is a smartphone. Oxigen services has a retail footprint of 2 lakh outlets and has processed close to four billion transactions till date with a current transaction volume rate of 600 million transactions per annum and a large customer base of over 150 million.

Since November 8, we have suddenly seen a spike in both app downloads and new merchant registrations. This spike is now coming from all cities—big and small—pan India. One common thread that we see emerging both in rural as well as the urban merchant class is a demand for the deployment of Oxigen’s micro ATM, which provides Aadhaar biometric-based transactions for financial services such as cash-in or cash-out, instant bank account opening, balance enquiry, funds transfer to another Aadhaar-linked bank account, PAN card, eKYC service and pension payments. This very same micro ATM in urban areas doubles up as a point of sale device, where it accepts swipe or chip and pin transactions of Rupay, Master, Visa cards, utility bill payments, recharges, travel tickets, and more.

Daily registrations have gone up through the Oxigen wallet app downloads. We have also seen increase in loading money, transactions and the “in app prepaid visa card” use. Adoption of the digital wallet is visible with 75 per cent transactions coming from urban areas and the rest from the rural areas. Looking at the trends, we can be sure that electronic payments are the future and that digital will redefine the payment systems in years to come.

Ankur Saxena is CEO, Oxigen Wallet