Have you ever wandered into a store to buy groceries or struck a good bargain with your local vegetable vendor only to realise that you have left your wallet at home? Yes, it happens to all of us. Starting this week, IIT Guwahati aims at alleviating all such woes for the residents of its campus with the introduction of ‘ftcash’, a mobile payment platform.
The ftcash mobile app is an e-commerce platform that allows transactions between micro-merchants and customers. A brainchild of co-founders Sanjeev Chadhak, Deepak Kothari and Vaibhav Lodha, ftcash, was recently launched in IIT Guwahati.
ftcash was created with the vision to enable smooth and hassle-free transactions with small vendors and micro-merchants, like the milkman or the vegetable vendor. Although these transactions make up the bulk of our daily expenditures, most of them are still offline. Ftcash provides a way for these offline vendors to be more accessible to customers because the purchased items can be delivered to their homes and they can pay remotely via their smartphones. It will also help these small vendors compete with the online merchants.
Currently, ftcash is available at 5 stores in IIT Guwahati. It hopes to expand its reach across the entire campus. Soon it will be available in all campus canteens, juice centres and other stores making IIT G a cashless campus. One will never have to worry about forgetting his wallet again. Apart from presenting the users with a convenient way of making payments, it is also offering discounts on daily purchases to attract a larger customer base. The ftcash app can be easily downloaded to any smartphone. Its mobile payment system accepts credit cards, debit cards, and mobile wallets (like Paytm and Mobikwik).
Given the recent growth of online payments and digital transactions, it is certainly a step in the right direction. However, it will be interesting to see how far it will succeed in its bid to make the entire campus a cashless one.
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