By 
By Jawahar B Lalla
As I am sharing my thoughts on #Sound Box and how it works? one of the leading IT Company invited me to write my thoughts on their company web page.
RELATED: Meta and MediaTek race to bring Gen AI to smartphones, says GlobalData
Sharing my thoughts on the subject matter.
Sound Box is a nifty internet-connected device that reads out payment confirmation messages from your mobile or phone. Its voice Point of Sales Terminal
The sound box device was first introduced by India’s largest fintech company, Paytm, in the year 2019 and has been a runaway hit among small Indian businesses.
Neighborhood mom-and-pop stores kiranas stores and street vendors, who had traditionally shied away from paying for tech services, have warmed up to the sound box on an experimental basis.
The sound box is the smart device essentially with a built-in speaker bearing the logo of the fintech company facilitating the transactions through a built-in SIM card.
Most available sound boxes in the Indian market can read out payment confirmation messages in English and multiple Indian languages, such as Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, and Punjabi.
Digital payments have taken off in a big leap in India due to the government’s NPCI unified payments interface (UPI) that allows users to make instant bank transfers with mobile phones.
The volume of UPI transactions in the country grew from 20 million in the 2017 financial year to 60 billion by the third quarter of 2023.
The value of UPI transactions made in the same period skyrocketed from 1,000 Crs (over $121 million) to 100 lakh Crs rupees (over $1.2 trillion), as per market reports.
As per one leading fintech company Paytm sound box subscriptions touched 1,197 Crs ($150 million). The company already has 6.8 million devices deployed across the country running successfully.
Sound boxes also enable Fintech Companies to cross-sell their other financial services to these merchants.
The estimated deployments of 900,000–1 million devices every quarter in India for the year 2023 as per market reports.
Google, Reliance and many other companies are working around sound boxes with their customized versions.
Today sound boxes should have built in strong security features like SOC 2 Type II, PCI-DSS, HIPAA, and GDPR built into their products solutions.
The question which comes to my mind. In today’s Artificial Intelligence wave where voice calls can be cloned would sound box a safer bet in fintech space? One needs to wait and watch.
Author: Mr. Jawahar B Lalla is an accomplished senior management executive & business leader who have demonstrated a successful history of 40-plus years in innovation, developing, acquiring, engaging, and building alliance partnerships with clients & partners across the globe. These are his personal views.
