Pine Labs is an Indian merchant platform company that develops a mobile point of sale platform that offers credit and debit card payment solutions for merchants.
From late 1990s to 2004, Pine Labs was a smart card-based payment and loyalty solution for the petroleum sector. In 2004, founders Rajul Garg and Tarun Upadhaya left the company. Lokvir, who was working with the founding team, took over as CEO and spent the next decade taking Pine Labs beyond petrocards and loyalty points, and into the world of digital payments infrastructure, making the company an early mover in the fintech space. When he took over, Lokvir also realised that everything they provided to existing customers in the petroleum sector (financial offerings, smart card solutions), could be easily extended to other retailers. Pine Labs zeroed in on this gap, became a technology partner for several banks, and started providing merchants with its PoS devices. Banks, in turn, referred Pine Labs to merchants, getting the company a much-needed foot in the door with first-time users. The likes of Future Group and Shoppers’ Stop signed on as its earliest clients, validating their idea. Being one of the first entrants in the market, in a few years, PineLabs became India’s largest PoS player. The next big boost for Pine Labs came in 2012-13, when the Reserve Bank of India directed banks to enhance security on debit cards, which resulted in the four-digit PIN that is still used to complete offline transactions. The enhanced security layer saw debit card usage in India shoot up, pushing up demand for Pine Labs’ PoS machines. As debit cards became more popular and and ecommerce and online payments began picking up, merchants too began taking a deeper interest in how the payments process worked and how it could be made better. So, the team decided to build a cloud-based payments platform for offline merchants. Soon enough, Pine Labs’ PoS System replaced the plain vanilla card and bank-centric PoS terminal. This was a cloud-based platform that could process payments across debit, credit, gift, loyalty, and later United Payments Interface (UPI) and mobile wallets as well. This ensured every transaction and billing detail entered by a cashier, along with the sales and transaction behaviour, was automatically transferred to the cloud. In late 2017, Pine Labs decided to look beyond India at international markets, and started building new services for different types of merchants and stakeholders in the financial services ecosystem.
