DiGiSPICE — earlier Spice Digital — known for manufacturing mobile phones, has entered Australia and the UK. The company had earlier merged all its international operations in West Asia, South Asia, Africa, and South-East Asia under the DiGiSPICE brand.

“Our play was largely (till now) in the emerging markets. But our capabilities definitely exceed such markets, and hence, we have just opened our UK and Australia markets,” Preeti Das, CEO, DiGiSPICE, told BusinessLine . “We have just seeded that (UK and Australia). It will be a little bit of a discovery process,” she added.

“The play there is 100 per cent technology,” said Das, elaborating that basic payment solutions in the fintech space will not be the focus in these developed markets. The focus will largely be on micro-lending and micro-finance on the fintech side.

“But we see opportunity on the telco-enterprise side,” Das said. The company sees 5G and Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality (AR-VR) changing the way in which telcos approach design and post-sale service.

But the company’s focus on emerging markets in Africa and Southeast Asia will remain. Das said that the company wants to learn from the developed markets and bring that expertise to emerging ones.

“The beauty of being in these (emerging) markets is the high cost of data and lower smartphone penetration,” Das said. “Once data costs come down, the disruption in these markets is so fast that we want to be prepared for a switchover,” she added. DiGiSPICE is creating a technology framework that will help a faster switchover when such a disruption takes place.

Digital payment

In India, the company’s Spice Money service claimed to have crossed ₹1,400 crore in gross transaction value last December. The service uses local kirana stores that function like ‘mini banks’ to offer cash deposit and cash withdrawal services, apart from ticket booking, bill payments, etc.

Mrinal Seth, DiGiSPICE’s Senior General Manager for special projects, revealed that the company is working on a geo-tagging model for Spice Money, with which it will know the exact location of every retail counter in the country. “That will be registered to his (the retailer’s) Aadhaar, PAN card,” Seth said.

On compliance with the government’s March 1 deadline for KYC compliance, Seth said that Spice Money got a team on the ground to physically collect KYC information from its retailers and claimed that “usually, all of them are KYC compliant”. However, he also said that the KYC deadline was a hurdle. “It is a burden for us because we lose out on revenue for that number of days. If there is no KYC, the transaction does not go through,” Seth said.

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