One Wallet Newspaper, a first of its kind application that lets one pay their newspaper bills online, allows vendors to manage their customers and process all their transactions online has proven to be a boon for newspaper vendors in India. Apart from seeking a leading position in the industry, One Wallet is well on its way to make an impact so big that it forever changes the way the newspaper industry works. It strives to digitize the otherwise conservative industry and provides a common platform for management, automated bill generation and payment collection to the vendors. With the launch of the application in November 2015, for the first time in over 2 centuries of the industry’s history, vendors are equipped with technology and are collecting their bills online.
Mr. Neeraj Tiwari, the founder of One Wallet has always been fascinated with technology and wanted to use technology for the benefit of the overburdened unorganized businesses. He was struck with the idea of developing One Wallet Newspaper app when he found his newspaper vendor at his doorstep as late as 9:30 PM for bill collection. He was determined to do something for the benefit of such businesses by giving them access to technology and helping them adapt to it. Further, through One Wallet’s in-house research, he found that around Rs. 5000 crore worth of bills are distributed and collected manually by 6 lakhs newspaper vendors in India.
Since the launch of the app in November 2015, 1500 vendors are registered with the application and around 50,000 households are connected to pay their bills online. The application once installed on the newspaper vendor’s mobile phone generates bills automatically within seconds, which earlier use to take around 15-20 days to reach his customers. As soon as the bill is generated it is sent to customer’s android Smartphone, through SMS, email and consumer application to facilitate online bill payment. In this digital age, the application aims to minimize vendor’s paperwork and helps them run their business and expand. One Wallet has tied up with 134+ newspaper publishers to procure paper prices and also provide important updates to the vendors. The vendors would no more have to keep a track of all the prices of the newspapers manually.
By December 2016, One Wallet aims to connect with 50000+ newspaper vendors. Realizing that this is the best time for fresh and radical thinking, they have secured a patent to digitize the coupon subscription system and are in a process to launch the same in the next 2 months. Through this feature, the vendors can avoid the frequent losses incurred by them through loss of physical coupons. The vendors won’t have to visit the publisher’s office to encash the coupons. Processing of coupons will be done online, thus saving time and energy of the vendors to a great extent. The coupon delivery and coupon payment time will be reduced to 5 minutes and 24 hours respectively. They are currently operating in Mumbai and intend to cover the entire state of Maharashtra by July 2016.
In the current millennials driven ‘Startup’ era One Wallet seems to do something that others have not even thought of. With such vast unorganized market left untapped, it looks like they are heading in the right direction.
