App that helps you just ‘tap and pay’ using your smartphone

We all have had the exhausting experience of standing in long queues in big retail stores, shopping malls or even food joints to pay for our purchases. Although the advent of credit/debit cards did reduce the strain of the task a little but standing in queues has become an unavoidable situation. Now to overcome this problem and leverage into this issue, a startup iKaaz Softwares has launched a mobile payment app among other things to make cash transaction a historical entity. 

Founded in 2012 by ex-Nokia employee Soma Sundaram, iKaaz software has two main products and the recently launched one is a mobile wallet app called MOWA which is in partnership with Dena Bank. The app is a mobile driven retail payment platform which enables remote payments via any feature phone.

It works on a simple techonlogy of ‘tap and pay’, wherein the consumers just need to download the app, feed in their mobile number, name and date of birth and link their debit/credit card with the app. Whenever the user wants to make a transaction, they just need to enter the amount and send the money to any person in their contact list.

Now what makes the app so different from the already existing ones like Oxigen or Paytm? Pat comes the reply from the CEO of iKaaz, Soma, “The existing technology needs the user to move their money from their bank account to the wallet and then transfer the money wherever they want. But in our app, the customer can keep the money in his bank account itself and whenever he makes the transaction the money gets transferred from the bank account. Thus lessening the burden of storing funds in the m-wallet”.

The app is a boon for millions of small time merchants and kirana stores who want to go digital with their transaction but do not have the technology and/or the financials to afford a point of sale (PoS) terminal.

Apart from this, the app can also be used for making any transactions — be it for bill payments or mobile recharge. Soma also claims that the app comes with multi-level security authentication and is compliant with RBI guidelines. The company had also launched the NFC (near field technology) enabled chip which can be fit into a phone and can be used to pay for transactions in large retail stores, shopping malls and even restaurants.

But for this the retailer needed to have a PoS terminal which costs around '2,500. With presence in most of the southern states and also in African countries like Nigeria and Kenya, the firm already has about 7,500 merchants, including hotels, restaurants, kirana stores and telecom stores which accept cashless payments through it’s NFC cards. These entities could easily adopt MOWA, Soma adds.