Nandan Nilekani On How SMEs Are Amongst The Biggest Beneficiaries Of Digital Public Infrastructure Nandan Nilekani, non-executive chairman of Infosys, during a discussion on Tuesday made several notable observations relating to SMEs.

Nandan Nilekani, non-executive chairman of Infosys, during a discussion on Tuesday made several notable observations relating to SMEs. During a fireside chat, he spoke about how SMEs are amongst the biggest beneficiaries of Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI).

"In most countries today you have all set of companies that are providing very affordable accounting packages that run on smartphones and PCs. Like in India we have historically had companies like Tally," he said.

Speaking about the phenomenon of digital payments, he further said, "Most people would actually prefer to take digital payments. We have found in India that UPI has been a successful endeavour. UPI does about 10.5 million transactions in the market, and 50 million merchants take QR coded payments. That means there are 50 million merchants today, very small merchants including the person on the road who is taking UPI payments because it is so much more convenient for them. They don't have to worry about the issue of security since they are not collecting cash from anyone. Also, there is always a record of these payments."

During the fireside chat at the Global SME Finance Forum 2023 in Mumbai, Sopnendu Mohanty, Chief Fintech Officer, Monetary Authority of Singapore also asked Nilekani about companies using technology from India. "Nobody is saying that you have to take the technology from India, they can build it on their own too. But if there is a proven technology which has been proved at scale, and is available as an open source, they can take open source code and can customize it according to their needs," Nilekani answered.