Point of sales or PoS platform Pine Labs has launched a new app that lets small merchants accept plastic-card based payments using their NFC-enabled smartphone. For using AllTap, Merchants will not require any hardware and it is certified by the PCI Security Standards Council, RuPay, Visa, Mastercard and Amex.
AllTap is largely positioned at homepreneurs, street vendors, hawkers, cab drivers, and others who aren’t scaled enough to have a PoS machine and using the app, they can convert their NFC-enabled smartphone into a payment acceptance device.
While the product is undoubtedly an innovation, it’s not going to be adopted on a mass scale because of likely adoption challenges and a flat or non-negotiable MDR charge. For PoS machine transactions, MDR charges are negotiable to some extent. However, it’s fixed on AllTap.
“…Pine Labs AllTap has tremendous potential to bridge the digital divide not only in India but also in other markets. We are excited to introduce this pioneering app in the market today,” said B. Amrish Rau, CEO, Pine Labs in a statement.
According to the company, the app requires little documentation for the digital onboarding of merchants. The launch of AllTap has come a month after Pine Labs had closed a $100 million fresh investment round from Lone Pine Capital. In January last year, it had gathered $300 million in a Series H round from Mastercard.
Pine Labs claims to serve more than 150,000 merchants in 3,700 cities across Asia and the Middle East and covers large, mid-sized and small merchants across the two regions. Its cloud-based platform offers a wide range of payment acceptance and merchant commerce solutions including enterprise automation systems and customer relationship management.
Sequoia Capital is an early backer of Pine Labs and with 42.53% stake, it owns the biggest chunk of the unicorn. In May last year, Sequoia had offloaded around $26.8 million worth shares in the Series H round. As of now, Sequoia has managed to cash in nearly $181 million via multiple secondary transactions over the past several years.
