Synopsis
India's digital payments sector faces a critical shortage of new point-of-sale (PoS) terminals due to disruptions in imports from China and West Asia crisis. This has led to a 15-20% price increase for devices, forcing companies to extend terminal lifecycles and manage existing assets more effectively.Nearly all PoS terminals used in India are imported by banks and fintech firms, making local supplies vulnerable to geopolitical disruptions.
Their demand has risen amid increasing digitisation of payments and merchants upgrading to terminals capable of processing mobile payments, tap-and-pay and chip-and-pin transactions. “We are running a backlog of nearly 200,000 deployments,” said Amrish Rau, chief executive officer of Pine Labs, one of the largest deployers of PoS terminals in the country.
“PoS demand has shot up because mid-market merchants prefer UPI on the PoS machine due to security and recon issues. 70% of PoS transactions are now on UPI,” Rau said.
Other significant PoS deployers include Paytm, Innoviti Payments, MSwipe, Razorpay and Worldline, which has been recently acquired by online payment aggregator Billdesk.
