PayNearby turned India's kirana shops into bank branches

PayNearby was founded in April 2016 by Anand Kumar Bajaj and co-founders to fix a simple gap: India's villages had neighbourhood shops but few bank branches. Instead of opening branches, it partners with existing stores — kirana, mobile-recharge, medical shops — and gives them the tools to sell financial services to their own customers.

The mechanism hinges on Aadhaar-enabled banking: a customer's fingerprint at a biometric micro-ATM stands in for a card and PIN, so cash withdrawal, deposits, remittances, bill payments, insurance, travel and government-benefit access all happen at the store counter. The shopkeeper gets a commission, turning the store's footfall into a second income stream.

By 2021 the network ran about 15 lakh retail stores across 17,500 PIN codes, moving over ₹5,500 crore a month, with ₹54,000 crore GTV in FY2021; by 2025 PayNearby claimed 41 lakh-plus microentrepreneurs across 17,600-plus PIN codes serving over 20 crore customers at roughly ₹6,000 crore GTV a month. BusinessLine reported UPI transactions at its rural and semi-urban counters up 650% year-on-year in 2022.

Make the shopkeeper the bank; the storefront the branch

Retailers sit where people already go, so there is zero new real estate and no travel for the customer.

Assisted transactions solve the literacy and trust barriers that self-service apps cannot.

Commission aligns the shopkeeper's incentive with pushing financial services.

Aadhaar biometrics remove the documents and PINs that exclude the poor.

Distribution beats infrastructure: put financial services inside stores people already trust and visit, and the shopkeeper's commission does the selling.

PayNearby extended from cash services into UPI, micro-credit (up 263% at counters in 2022), cash collection for e-commerce and insurers, and travel. It now calls itself India's largest branchless banking and digital payments network, running on a Distribution-as-a-Service model that claims to cover most of India's PIN codes.