Pine lab - today's unique solution for merchants problems

Small businesses and consumers are fast adapting to digital commerce and virtual checkout. there's tremendous uptake in Pay Later services and have now enabled nearly 150,000 outlets for this. It’s time to take a position heavily in offline and online commerce across India and SEA.

It was in 2009 that Pine labs' real journey started after they ventured into the world if digital payments space to produce solutions to merchants, ensuring their connection with banks and other financial services. They were acutely aware that merchants were seeking solutions to reinforce their engagement with customers during the payment process. So, the corporate partnered with banks and payment aggregators and ensured our POS terminal could process all styles of digital payments.

Foundation

One of India’s oldest fintech companies, Pine Labs started as an easy card-based payment and loyalty program in 1998. Pine Labs offers a full-stack merchant platform that's a novel blend of technology and financial solutions. Its founder Lokvir Kapoor joined Pine Labs in 2003-04, but the corporate was founded in 1998. The emblem of pine labs denotes a bright green double arrow symbol pointed Northeast and denotes growth prosperity and optimism.

Mission- Pine Labs

Pine Labs' mission statement says, "Maniacal concentrates on creating a product and services platform that widens access and accelerates commerce for merchants in each local market we operate in."

Founders were acutely aware that merchants were seeking solutions to boost their engagement with customers during the payment process. They partnered with banks and payment aggregators and ensured our POS terminal could process all kinds of digital payments. Pine Labs has grown significantly to capture markets outside India including the Middle East. After twenty years of working closely with merchants, Pine Labs now help merchants sell more, grow more, and build more with greater efficiency. They serve merchants’ omnichannel needs. Over 1,00,000 merchants across sectors - electronics, food, beverage, fashion, airlines, etc, use Pine Labs’ solutions. 15 major banks, 7 financial institutions, and 100+ brands are part of Pine Labs’ platform.

Need for such venture

Pine Labs isn't a brand that resides in your wallet the way Visa, MasterCard, or American Express do, but if you’ve ever swiped your card to buy something, chances are high that, you’ve probably done so on a point-of-sale (PoS) machine from Pine Labs. That little PoS machine does over just process your payment. Connected to the cloud, it's now a gateway to data that merchants – from small businesses to large department shops – want to grasp to stay their customers, and have them come for more.

Pine Labs offers a merchant platform that has the technology and financial solutions for merchants. These solutions are aimed toward helping merchants in increasing their revenue and reducing cost, complexity, and risk. this provides Pine Labs with a novel opportunity to participate in their growth journey. They specialize in merchants’ needs, revenue generation strategies, last-mile retail transaction technologies, data analysis, and experiences for his or her shoppers and customers. They provide a full-stack merchant platform that's a novel blend of technology and financial solutions.

The main idea behind the  establishment

Pine Labs was established as card-based payments and loyalty solutions provider initially. However, it pivoted the business model in 2012 to supply a PoS platform to merchants as their “needs evolved,” the corporate website reasoned for the pivot. In late 2017, Pine Labs decided to seem beyond India at international markets and began building new services for various forms of merchants and stakeholders within the financial services ecosystem. New plans necessitated a brand new approach. Their alliances with top banks and makes gave them the flexibility to supply multiple services to the merchant through their platform.

Catering the requirements of society

The company provides mobile point of sale solutions that allow merchants to simply accept credit and charge account credit payments. A number of the offerings of Pine Labs include Cashback Programs, PaybyPoints, Loyalty Solutions, Dynamic Currency Conversion, Gift Solution, Instant EMI, Instant Discounts, e-Wallet, and Targeted Promotions. According to Pine Labs, it currently has over one lakh merchants as clients. 

The company also boasts of $16 billion in annualized payments value and claims to own facilitated $1 billion worth of customer credit through debit and credit cards. 15% of retail card payment volumes flow through the network of pine labs, which made it India's largest Pos provider. The corporate connects financial institutions and consumer brands to enable merchants to deliver value to their retail customers. The company’s cloud-based platform powers 3,50,000+ POS terminals across 3700 cities and towns in India and Malaysia.

Funding and collaboration

In March 2018, the corporate raised $82 million (₹ 530 crores) from Actis Capital, a non-public equity fund and Altimeter Capital, a California-based investment firm. As of May 2018, it's raised a complete of $208 million. Some of its investors include PayPal, Temasek, Actis Capital, Altimeter Capital, Sofina and Sequoia Capital. In its two-decade journey, the corporate achieved a singular distinction in Indian fintech – in FY2017, it became a profitable ‘unicorn', registering a net income of Rs 3.80 crore.

Pine Labs has become the primary unicorn from India after a cater to New York-based financial services major Mastercard. While the small print of the deal hasn't been disclosed, reports suggest it'll take Pine Labs' valuation to the maximum amount of $1.6 billion.

Future prospective

Then there are new solutions like Business Plus that give merchants real-time marketing tools and automatic customer engagement programs to assist them in sales and drive repeat buying. Pine Labs’ mobile platform Plutus Smart could be a Pine Labs’ Android-based smart transaction machine that allows merchants to process a complete sales transaction employing a single hand-held device.

Pine Labs is additionally partnering with leading NBFCs to supply retailers access to easy and collateral-free business loans. Digital retail payments platform Pine Labs is gearing up for the following phase of its journey. It's reaching to herald the most recent solutions that aim at proving better customer experience, intrude on new markets and categories, and eventually choose an initial public offering. 

India’s digital payments growth story has grabbed several eyeballs from international agencies furthermore as tech giants. From revolutionizing the employment of QR codes to Unified Payments Interface (UPI) to enabling point-of-sale via mobile-like devices etc, the innovation in the Indian digital payments industry has awed the globe. While most of those innovative and disruptive ideas haven’t reaped profits, but point-of-sale (PoS) player Pine Labs did in 2017.