Your Friendly Neighbourhood!

Today is International Women’s Day and I thought of talking about tremendous contributions women make in business and life and how platforms can make a difference

Happy Reading and Happy Women’s Day.

Growing platformization of businesses has also created opportunities for lot of women entrepreneurs to run their businesses from their homes or smaller establishments and yet have access to the literally the world. Meesho has created a world of opportunities for home based entrepreneurs and leveraged the power of WhatsApp for students, homemakers and business owners members of the four-year-old venture of whom ninety percent are women. Our own neighbourhood community app Trice has empowered home based chefs to become entrepreneurs and thus empowered them. It is heartening to see women drawn into formal financial world when they open their first sole beneficiary bank account and take first steps towards financial independence.

Neighbourhood commerce is a three Legged Stool- Discovery, Payment and Logistics- and platforms have played an important role in its growth over last few years especially during demonetisation and covid19 pandemic.

Japanese philosophy of Ikagai can provide an understanding of passion economy and platforms. Intersection of two circles of ‘What I am good at’ and ‘What I love Doing’ results in PASSION. Next circle about ‘What the World Needs’ can be loosely translated into Demand Aggregation and ‘What You Can be Paid for’ can be seen as Monetisation Strategy. So, Passion along with Demand Aggregation and Monetisation Strategy provided by platforms can really make it work !

Platforms have been path-breaking in helping us in discovery process for singers/chefs/writers/craft-persons /painters etc and all of us have an interesting story about finding our inspiration without even looking for it. For example, at Trice Community, residents in gated communities are glad to reach their favourite home chefs/artists/cause directly and vice versa.

Micropayments have been revolutionized by platforms mostly with the support of Unified Payment Interface (UPI) launched by National Payment Corporation of India (NPCI). Launched in 2016, UPI has seen tremendous adoption during the immediate use case following demonetisation, further accelerated by the Covid-19 outbreak.According to the latest NPCI report,

In Calendar Year 21, UPI had processed more than 38 billion transactions, amounting to Rs 71.59 trillion. In 2021-22 (Financial Year 22) so far, it has processed more than 31 billion transactions, surpassing the transactions processed in 2020-21 (FY21).

In the era of hyper-globalisation, we crave for local connections. Location based platforms can help in finding the connections from your proximity.Retail Operations especially for the local street vendors have been extraordinarily helped by last mile delivery partners like Dunzo and ShadowFax. Some of them also provide warehousing, payment collection and reverse logistics.

To conclude, more users are interested in local/niche products & services and neighborhood commerce ecosystem should step up to serve this efficiently. Platforms like TRICE which provide discovery, payments and last mile logistics can play a pivotal role in bringing business and dignity to millions of street vendors across the communities.

So, next time you want to buy something, spare a thought for the local vendor and give your business to your friendly neighborhood!

Put a Smile on their Face! Watch out for more by following #MillionVendorStories #MillionVendorSmiles

PS- The cover picture is one of the finest ALL-Women team that I know! That's my better half Archana and her teachers at SUNBEAM Kids Play School.