Registered 5mn merchants via Amazon Pay, focussed on helping SMBs embrace e-payments: Amazon

Amazon on Saturday said it has registered 5 million merchants through Amazon Pay - its payments unit - and that it remains focussed on helping more small and medium businesses (SMBs) in the country to embrace digital payments.

These merchants, many of whom earlier transacted only in cash, are now accepting payments from their customers using Amazon Pay's QR Code.

"Since 2019, we have registered 5 million merchants through Amazon Pay and gotten 40 million customers through our service to use UPI. We're obviously not alone and the more companies like Amazon, and our competitors all help, the flywheel spins faster," Amazon Senior Vice President Russell Grandinetti said during the Amazon Smbhav event.

He added organisations and governments across the world are not only inspired by Aadhaar, the India Stack and UPI but they are also looking at emulating these models.

As part of the government's Digital India vision, a set of tools have been created under India Stack to help the government agencies, businesses, startups and developers in developing solutions to solve challenges like financial inclusion, delivery of services etc.

This includes Aadhaar, e-KYC and UPI among others. Grandinetti cited examples of how these tools have helped individual sellers reach customers across the country, and how moving orders across state borders has become simpler.

"And now when we look to the future, we want to help Indian businesses get bigger...I'm very optimistic about the coming years for India, I'm very optimistic about what we can accomplish, building on this foundation," he added.

Mahendra Nerurkar, CEO of Amazon Pay India, said by enabling more than 50 lakh small business owners and entrepreneurs to accept digital payments, the company is expediting their inclusion into digital India.

"We have built and scaled our digital payment acceptance for SMBs using UPI that is inarguably one of the world's biggest digital payments platforms and look forward to creating more products that transform the way India pays,” he said.

Of the over 50 lakh SMBs who use Amazon Pay, more than 25 lakh operate retail and shopping outlets such as Kirana stores.

About 10 lakh operate food and beverage outlets such as restaurants and small eateries, over 5 lakh offer services such as salons, close to 4 lakh offer health and medical care and the remaining comprise vocations such as taxi drivers, auto drivers, plumbers and others.

Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani noted that small businesses are the future of India.

"I strongly believe that they are the engines of economic growth and job creation. And I believe that they will have a very good future...They are also becoming much more digital literate," he said.

The Aadhaar architect explained that as these businesses go digital, the availability of real-time data can help banks assess the creditworthiness of small companies and offer lending based on business flow and not assets.

"So, you are actually lending on the strength of the business of the small company," he said.

Nilekani added that tools like Digilockder and e-Sign, small businesses can provide a more efficient system, deliver more to the consumers, increase sales and create jobs.