ICICI Bank launches a contactless banking platform for merchants

By Leandra Monteiro

ICICI Bank announced today the launch of ‘Merchant Stack’, a set of comprehensive digital banking services curated keeping in mind retail merchants. The array of banking as well as value-added services enables merchants grocers, super markets, large retail store chains, online businesses and large e-commerce firms to meet their banking requirements during these challenging times.

This initiative is in-line with the Bank’s ideology of ‘Business with Care’. Retail merchants can avail of these contactless services, without visiting the Bank’s branches. They can avail of these facilities instantly, on InstaBIZ, the Bank’s mobile banking application for businesses.

‘Merchant Stack’ provides a bouquet of banking solutions and value-added services in ‘one single place’ for the retailer eco-system. The main pillars of the stack are –

• 1) A new account named, ‘Super Merchant Current Account’
• 2) Two instant credit facilities called ‘Merchant Overdraft’ and ‘Express Credit ; both are’ based on POS transactions
• 3) ‘Digital Store Management’ facility to help merchants take their business online
• 4) Exclusive loyalty rewards programme
• 5) Value added services like alliances with major e-commerce and digital marketing platforms for expansion of online presence.

Commenting on the launch, Anup Bagchi, ICICI Bank said, “We always believe that the self-employed and the MSME segment forms the backbone of the Indian economy. A large part of this segment consists of retail merchants. There are over 2 crore merchants in the country with approximately USD 780 billion in value of transactions in 2020. They are expected to grow rapidly in the coming years. Through these trying times of the pandemic, it is our endeavour to enable the merchants with a digital banking platform that will help them to continue to serve their customers. We have thus launched the ‘Merchant Stack’, which most importantly offers a range of ‘contactless’ banking services, providing safety to the merchants and their customers alike. This new offering is part of our guiding principle of ‘Business with Care’. It is also a continuation of ‘ICICI Stack’ which we launched a year ago to offer retail customers all digital banking services from one platform.”

He added, “We believe that the ‘Merchant Stack’ offers the most holistic array of banking and value-added banking services for the retail merchant ecosystem. Our research shows that this segment requires digital and instant account opening, multiple digital collection options in one place and quick working capital availability, among others. Armed with these insights, we have created a full stack that brings in a host of digital services specially curated for merchants. Further, all of the solutions are available on our mobile application, InstaBiz. We have also leveraged advanced analytics to use various parameters of POS transactions to offer instant overdraft and settlement of the swipes. We believe that this ‘all-in-one’ and comprehensive ‘Merchant Stack’ will provide easy digital banking to retailers, free up their bandwidth from paper-intensive procedures and thus boost their business growth by improving overall productivity and efficiency.”