HERALD: What is your field of specialty?
SANMATI SHENDURE: We are looking forward to innovating in one of India’s biggest unorganised sector that is the micro retail industry. 85-90 per cent of the Indian retail sector is completely unorganised. We see that the growth of B2C e-commerce and mall culture is crushing the business of small retailers across the country and there are very few companies in India who are trying to help them scale and manage their business in an innovative way. We want to be the enablers and disrupters in the micro retail sector of India by helping them to change the way they do their business. We chose telecom industry to enter into this space and now we are diversifying our categories into payment space, e-commerce and logistics in next few months. We initially changed the way our retailers do their telecom recharges, we are changing the way our micro-retailers accept the digital payment and we are looking further to change the way they sell their items from their shop.
HERALD: How does your company help Goans?
SS: Minkspay truly believes that building world-class payment product from anywhere in India is completely possible and hence we started and built our entire product team here in Goa. We are proud to say that we are Goa’s first payment-based company building its market at an all-India scale. We help a lot of Goan students and freshers to build the right skill-set for their growth and sustainable carrier. We recently took a couple of students from Goa University MCA dept for an internship program at Minkspay and they are really enjoying being part of this innovation focused payment company.
HERALD: Who are your customers?
SS: All micro-retail stores are our major customers and we design our entire product ecosystem based on their requirements.
HERALD:What new innovation have you introduced?
SS: We have added micro banking feature like domestic money transfer for millions of immigrant workers who need to send their money to their homes without any hassle of filling multiple forms and standing in a queue and transferring the amount within banking time. This has converted all the Minkspay retail outlets into micro banking counters.
Recently we have started working on Aadhaar Micro ATM technology which will enable any banks customer to walk into any Minkspay store and deposit or withdraw their money by just using their fingerprint regardless of any debit or credit card. We are thinking to roll out this as a completely new feature in our existing Minkspay App by the end of April.
HERALD: How do you see the Goa market?
SS: We see that there is really a huge uncovered market here in Goa and lot of micro-retailers around here were waiting for some really good merchant App like this. We started as www.minksrecharge.in from February 2016 with just 20 retailers/agents from northern part of Goa and now we have expanded our network to 25 cities of Goa, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Gujarat with 3500+ retailers/agents processing more than 22,000 transactions per day and have a plans of expanding it to more than 10,000 retailers network by entering into payment and micro ATM solutions and categories like Mpos and Aadhaar Pay in next three months. By the end of this year, we are looking further to expand our network in multiple states of India.
HERALD: Do you believe that product-based companies are changing the consumer and industry behaviour in India by leveraging technology?
SS: We all have analysed the market changes from last decade, how technology has really disrupted one of India’s biggest unorganised sectors; as we know hospitality, hotel, real estate and cab industry has changed a lot from last 10 years by enabling innovation and technology as key driven aspects of this change and growth. Few major names within these sectors would be OYO, Flipkart, Ola, Paytm. We too are looking forward to innovate one of India’s biggest unorganised sector that is the micro retail industry. Minkspay is one of the few product companies from Goa who are trying to solve the national scale problem and more focused towards India specific innovation.
HERALD: Where do you see yourself in the next five years?
SS: We aspire to become one of India’s largest and most loved retail network and B2B payment platform. We want to be the enablers and disrupters in the micro retail sector of India by helping them to change the way they do their business. We chose telecom industry to enter into this space and now we are diversifying our categories into payment space, e-commerce and logistics in next few months. we initially changed the way our retailers do their telecom recharges, we are changing the way our micro-retailers accept the digital payment and we are looking further to change the way they sell their items from their shop.
