Our 21st-century society has seen the spiraling impact of western binge-watching culture, marking OTT platforms as an inevitable daily dose of entertainment from viewing acclaimed films, to settling a charge out of flinch content, but are these paid entertainment zones suiting the financial reality and backgrounds of middle-class Indians?

When the streaming service providers were treading in a hyper-competitive relay, at that point, entered MX Player, a company having the disadvantage of rivaling with the tribe tardy but still dared to break customary norms and ran a marathon in the opposite direction, fitting in the aspirations, limitations and requirements of every average Indian. 

How did MX Player fuel from a mere multimedia playback application to a leading video streaming platform on smartphones with a gigantic global install base of over 500 million?       

In the field of enterprise payment systems and solutions, the jaded and aged are conventionally outmoded but some exceptional unicorns like Pine labs pursue a mark firmly in the history of time. An elementary start-up that kicked off as a card-predicated payment platform focusing on and facilitating the retail Indian petroleum sector now dominates the South-Asian market.

Pine labs witnessed fluctuating dynamism and suffered consequential losses in FY 2018-2019 while also astonishing the market and generating massive headlines as the first unicorn from India in the pandemic infested year as it ended 2020 with a path-breaking overall company valuation of $2 billion.

Pine Labs: Oscillating Initial Years

An idea that moulded into loyalty points and a card-based payment solution founded in 1998, was the brainchild of Lokvir Kapoor, Rajul Garg, and Tarun Upadhyay. Pine Labs largely targeted the petroleum sector from 1998-2004, until two of its founding members Rajul Garg and Tarun Upadhyay decided to quit Pine Labs.

What transpired next was nothing less than all shades of a dramatic evolution for Lokvir Kapoor, who officially took charge as the CEO and seamlessly undermined the payment infrastructure in the petroleum industry.

Lokvir Kapoor invested time to indulge in and consider the technical offerings of banking systems in the early 2000s. The banks offered a more complex and subjectively inconvenient sales platform to merchants facilitating transactions over phone calls. Lokvir identified the dire need for a digital payment atmosphere. Hereafter, Pine Labs diversified its branches and entered the retail PoS (Point of Sales) payment systems.

How Did Pine Labs’ Real-World Payments Journey Begin?

Pine Labs worked for the following decade maintaining a low profile, picturizing the potential digital fintech advent.

From 2005-2009, the company commenced with EVM standard payment method and Visa certification, launching its multi-acquiring payments solution. Pine Labs partnered with known banks and archivist entities providing banking solutions and PoS machines to perform the role of processing diverse digital payments.

Pine Labs soon understood that the consumer banking experience is of utmost importance and to fill in the gap, user involvement should be the actual motive. Pine Labs centered its production on interfaces that allow customers easy accessibility and valuable satisfaction.

The year 2009 became a crucial year for the business as it raised a seed funding of $1 million by Sequoia Capital. Pine labs, in addition, inhabited a cutting-edge advertisement route where the partnered banks referred their PoS machines to entry-level businesses and consumer merchants.

Pine Labs not only understood consumer requisites and grievances but also worked as a remedy for consumers experiencing a digital dilemma when it comes to utilizing banking interfaces.

By truly venturing into the digital payments market in 2009, growth escalated, as from 2010-2011, Pine Labs overseas intervention fueled designing and developing an enterprise platform for Telekom Malaysia.

A Game-Changing Shift to Cloud Storage

In 2012, Pine Labs carved a revolutionary technological advancement solely by the move of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) that acted as a catalyst, enrolling banks to surge securities on debit cards, thereby increasing the authoritative ordinance for debit cards in India, parallelly shooting up the demand for the company’s PoS terminals.

Analysing the hike of e-commerce websites and online transactions, Pine Labs developed a cloud-based PoS gateway to set foot in the offline market, in addition, clearing a secondary barrier of storage in chips acquired by machines, a 2013 technology.

The cloud-predicated system shunned away from the bank-inclined pre-existing plain ‘vanilla’ cards PoS interface, as cloud storage was highly secure, integrated, and primarily crafted to deduct on spending and sizing noticeable revenues for retail merchants.

Pine Labs’ merger with known banks enabled growth, structuring it into a consumer-friendly merchant platform offering transaction-predicated solutions, layered analytics, integrated billing, cashback, and much more.

The Digital India Setup and Introduction to Transparent UIs

The debut of UPI into the market in 2016 was simultaneously followed by the implementation of Demonetization in 2017 by the Central government raising a need for digital transaction platforms.

To face its cut-throat competition, Pine Labs commenced designing android applications and setting up programs, allowing merchants to witness consumer marketing psychology, providing them with an upper hand in understanding business nuances.

MyPlutus and BusinessPlus developed by Pine Labs were applications and programmes that availed merchants to engage in marketing programs and real sales transactions. Plutus Smart intellective, an android operated transaction terminal functioned as a collective data resource for comparing EMIs offered by different banks, further introducing in-built bar code scanners.

The economic policies noted in India integrated strength to Pine Labs to boost digital transactions, enabling UPI and wallet predicated transactions through PoS.