Growing trend for e-payment

Growing take-up: Businesses are adopting e-payments for convenience.

MORE small retailers are seeing the need to adopt e-payment methods to make it more convenient for their customers and to grow their business.

This higher take-up rate can be attributed to the public and private sectors’ push last year – the former by directing local financial institutions to upgrade debit and credit cards with PIN and contactless payment and the latter through the launch of various e-payment apps in Malaysia.

Today, e-payment has become a major point of consideration for anyone who wishes to digitise their business. And this is most commonly accomplished through a smartphone app and a QR code which allows for transactions to be processed.

Mobile payment applications such as vcash from Digi offer SMES and micro-businesses a simple way to go cashless with a low merchant discount rate of 0.8%.

Hainanese coffee shop Yut Kee, which has been in business for more than 80 years, was one of the early adopters of vcash.

“In an age where cashless transactions are replacing conventional cash transactions, vcash became a choice for us. The charges per transaction are decent and on the low side,” said Mervyn Lee, Yut Kee’s manager.

“In terms of benefits, the convenience of having direct deposited funds by the end of the day makes transactions easy and fuss free. Also, it lowered the risk of cash-in-transit mishaps for us,” he added.

Another early adopter of e-payments is Life Juice.

“Our customers are constantly on the move and they do not want to spend time waiting in a queue to pay and this is apparent in how we modelled our retail points, with a pick-up-and-go concept. Not only does vcash complement our customers’ lifestyle but it also enables us to enhance our service experience at minimal investment, cost or risk,” said Alexander Leaw, general manager of Life Juice.

Vcash enables merchants to share a QR code for consumers to scan and input the payment amount. The transaction is then authenticated via a six digit PIN or fingerprint. Alternatively, this can be done through a vcash merchant.

SMEs and micro businesses are also able to know their customers better through vcash. With access to analytics, they have a helicopter view of their business, enabling them to leverage customers’ spending behaviour, track returning customers and analyse competitors.

vcash offers customisable solutions and can work with zero integration. It can also be fully integrated into a merchant’s POS system, which allows for vcash transactions to be customised according to the merchant’s needs.