Vi, Vodafone Idea’s enterprise arm has formed an alliance with Prosus-owned India’s digital financial service providers PayU, to offer digital payment solutions to Indian MSMEs.
The partnership is set to combine Vi Businesses’ digital transformation solutions and PayU’s expertise in digital payments and financial services solutions through customized offer engines, buy-now-pay-later options, and seamless WhatsApp integration.
ReadyForNext is Vi Business’ MSME program, which offers digital tools such as location tracking, Google Workspace, personal cloud storage and mobile security solutions built especially for MSMEs at special prices. These features would enable the management of digital workplace, business and customer engagements for the MSMEs.
Arvind Nevatia, Vi’s CEO, and PayU’s CEO Anirban Mukherjee, while speaking on the collaboration, shared similar opinions with the belief that the platforms are capable of revolutionizing MSMEs with digital innovation. The former said “By combining Vi Business’ best-in-class enterprise solutions and PayU’s expertise in fintech, we aim to accelerate MSMEs’ growth journey.”
The latter shared that the alliance of business and digital finance solutions is designed with the purpose to increase revenues and boost efficiency, which would prompt the MSMEs to thrive in the presently competitive market.
PayU received RBI’s approval to operate as a payment aggregator (PA) in April 2024. The fintech platform managed to reduce its losses by shutting down its prepaid payment instrument LazyCard last year and grow the overall profitability. Its revenue growth for FY22 and FY23 were noted 40% and 31% respectively.
With effect from July 3, Jio (469 million users), Airtel (385 million users) and Vi (219 million users), the top three telecom platforms in India in the same order, increased the prices for their prepaid and postpaid plans.
The MSME sector employs almost 113 million people, but faces problems such as unavailability of credit, regulatory issues, low scalability, and standardized policies, despite this, they contributed 30% of the country’s GDP, and accounted for 43.6% shares in the total exports in FY23.
