Will PineLabs’ AllTap Contactless Payments App Push Card Usage Past UPI?

Looking to boost card-based contactless payments at more retail points of sake, fintech unicorn Pine Labs has launched AllTap, an app to help small merchants enable contactless card payments over smartphones.

The company has claimed that the ‘tap and pay’ feature within the app is secure and is certified by PCI Security Standards Council (PCI SSC), RuPay, Visa, Mastercard and Amex to accept payments. The tech works over NFC (near-field communication) and only smartphones with NFC chips can leverage AllTap.

AllTap is being offered for key segments like small merchants, home entrepreneurs, street vendors, hawkers, cab drivers, and others who are not ready to invest in a traditional point-of-sale (PoS) terminal to accept digital payments.

Commenting on the launch, B. Amrish Rau, CEO of Pine Labs said, “We heard from small merchants, taxi drivers, self-employed individuals, tuition-givers, and several other solopreneurs, who wanted a simple digital payments acceptance solution. AllTap comes with a cutting-edge contactless payments technology and requires no additional hardware for merchants to start accepting digital payments.”

The AllTap app will allow merchants to accept 100+ digital payments options, including debit and credit cards payments, upto INR 5,000 using their smartphones. The platform will also offer EMI to high ticket size customers and enable merchants to accept payments through the app with different mobile. The app is available on the Google Play store and can be accessed by merchants’ pan-India.

Will Pine Labs’s AllTap Boost Card Usage?

It is also important to note that with several digital payments solutions coming into picture, the usage credit and debit cards have definitely been reduced. The biggest beneficiary has been the unified payments interface, which has become the defacto digital payments solution in India. WIth a plethora of apps enabling UPI through QR code and more, card usage has plummetted.

The National Payment Corporation of India (NPCI) data recorded INR 61,045 Cr peer to merchant UPI transactions  and INR 50,139 Cr through credit card transactions in September 2020. This has naturally prompted industry watchers to question whether UPI will eventually overtake credit card transactions over a longer period.

With almost zero footfall across retail outlets during the coronavirus lockdown, the credit card transactions fell from INR 50,697 Cr to INR 20,858. On the other hand, UPI based digital transactions grew immensely after a brief fall, as users have turned to online modes of payments and ecommerce. UPI fell below the billion mark to 990 Mn transactions in April, but also crossed the 2 Bn mark by October.