India's first payment processor is a Bitcoin company?

Image source: Dazhi

ePaisa, a mobile payment processor for small and medium-sized businesses that handles cash and card transactions, has also started offering Bitcoin services. An Indian startup founded in 2012 in Mumbai has launched a number of products that can be used in multiple languages.

ePaisa's multilingual POS-based mobile payment service can be promoted in areas where four different Indian dialects are used, not including English. These dialects include Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati and Tamil. ePaisa has now become India's first payment processor and the first Bitcoin provider by offering Bitcoin payment options.

More than 500 points of sale using ePaisa in New Delhi, Pune, Mumbai, Surat and Ahmedabad are now accepting Bitcoin transactions. Beyond these five cities, the company expects to see more Bitcoin transactions in Mumbai and New Delhi, as these two cities have a large number of foreign residents as well as local residents who are more willing to use Bitcoin for payment.

To process bitcoin transactions, ePaisa has been tied to a backend bitcoin exchange. When merchants receive bitcoins through ePaisa, they can choose to convert those bitcoins into Indian rupees, transfer them to their own accounts, or keep them in their original form.

Siddharth Arora, co-founder and CEO of ePaisa, told Asia Times that India has more than 50,000 bitcoin users and the Indian bitcoin economy has witnessed more than 35,000 bitcoin transactions last year.

So far, only selected international outlets have started accepting Bitcoin payments, but thanks to ePaisa’s introduction to this new reality, many small and medium-sized businesses are now also accepting Bitcoin payments.

ePaisa is now working on incorporating mobile payment options into its payment system. With the inclusion of mobile payment options and Bitcoin payment services, the company now aims to provide its partner merchants with all the cashless payment options available in the market.