India-based Marg ERP — which provides enterprise resource planning, inventory management and accounting technology to businesses — is reportedly developing an electronic B2B payments platform. Reports in The Hindu on Wednesday (Dec. 4) said that Marg ERP plans to debut the platform to promote business payment digitization for micro-, small and medium-sized businesses in India.
"We have created an app through which small retailers can seamlessly make payment to distributors [that] are now sending their staff for collecting payment," said Marg ERP Chairman and Managing Director Thakur Anup Singh, highlighting the particular challenge of a high volume of manual and cash payments in the pharmaceutical sector.
"If we achieve 20 percent of this, volume would be huge," he said. "We want to create a business environment where a distributor can work with ease, and we are solving their problem. It will bring down their cost, improve efficiency and promote digital payment."
He added that the beta version of the digital B2B payments platform is now live, with plans to launch the solution across the country.
"With our cost-effective solution, which a small retailer can afford, the efficiencies at their level [have] gone up substantially," continued Singh. "We are enabling them to compete with eRetailers, and helping them to comply with GST rules."
As India's FinTech community grows, more industry participants in the nation have turned their attention to B2B payments friction in recent years.
Earlier this year, PayMate Founder and CEO Ajay Adiseshann spoke with PYMNTS about India's B2B payments digitization journey. When it comes to dictating adoption of ePayments, it's usually the buyer with the power.
"He who has the gold, makes the rules," he said, pointing to the challenges of a lack of reconciliation and integration capabilities within basic point-to-point systems, which can often fail to address businesses' payment needs.
