A $10 Plastic Speaker is the Most Durable Revenue Line in Indian Digital Payments (indiadispatch.com)
(Thursday February 19, 2026 @05:20AM (msmash)
from the india-is-not-for-beginners dept.)
- Reference: 0180826148
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/26/02/19/1012235/a-10-plastic-speaker-is-the-most-durable-revenue-line-in-indian-digital-payments
- Source link: https://indiadispatch.com/p/indian-payments-most-durable-revenue
India's digital payment platforms process trillions of dollars a year through UPI, the government-built real-time payments rail that handles more than 90% of all payment transactions in the country, but one of their largest net revenue line items [1]is not a payment product at all : it's a cheap plastic speaker that sits on a shopkeeper's counter and reads out incoming payments aloud.
The roughly 23 million soundboxes deployed across India earn about $220 million a year in rental fees, more than every explicitly UPI-linked revenue line in the ecosystem combined, according to estimates from Bernstein. Each device costs $7-12 to manufacture and earns its platform $7-10 a year in rent. A story adds:
> PhonePe processes about 48% of all UPI transactions in India. Its net payment processing revenue in H1 FY26 was about $83 million. Its device revenue was about $34 million. Running nearly half of India's real-time payment infrastructure earns PhonePe only 2.4 times what it makes from renting speakers to shopkeepers.
[1] https://indiadispatch.com/p/indian-payments-most-durable-revenue
The roughly 23 million soundboxes deployed across India earn about $220 million a year in rental fees, more than every explicitly UPI-linked revenue line in the ecosystem combined, according to estimates from Bernstein. Each device costs $7-12 to manufacture and earns its platform $7-10 a year in rent. A story adds:
> PhonePe processes about 48% of all UPI transactions in India. Its net payment processing revenue in H1 FY26 was about $83 million. Its device revenue was about $34 million. Running nearly half of India's real-time payment infrastructure earns PhonePe only 2.4 times what it makes from renting speakers to shopkeepers.
[1] https://indiadispatch.com/p/indian-payments-most-durable-revenue
Because of analphabetism? (Score:2)
That's probably the reason it's a speaker and not a screen, correct? But then again, booking payments is only numbers, which shouldn't be that difficult. Any Indians here who can shed some light on this?
Re: Because of analphabetism? (Score:2)
It's an efficiency and convenience thing.
When this UPI system was launched, vendors had to continuously check their mobile to see if the payment had actually been received.
Now they just listen for the acknowledgement while multitasking.
Re: (Score:2)
no, even the illiterate need to have basic money skills since they need to be functional, illiteracy is not binary, it is a matter of degree
i suspect this is just the least expensive effective solution to the problem which is why it won out over alternatives