Like most Mumbaikars, entrepreneur Alakh Gargiya has relied on the neighbourhood mom-and-pop stores for his groceries. While he admired their simplicity, character and price stickiness, he also feared they were losing out in a rapidly changing economy. His business is therefore, an effort to save small businesses from slow death.

Gargiya is founder-CEO of Pay1, a retail tech platform helping the unorganised retailers across India embrace digitisation. "While researching the market, we realised that kirana stores don't need disruption but empowerment." Instead of trying to create a direct-to-customer model or expand the existing property, he decided to study the entities and strengthen them. "The DMarts and Flipkarts have various teams to look into tertiary functions, whether trend prediction, monetisation of infrastructure or customer service. When you go to a kiranawala, it's one man judging and doing all of this," he says. The team has, so far, conducted extensive interviews on ground to understand the needs of retailers. One of their primary concerns, he shares, is how to earn more money. "The immediate answer in the trade business would be to sell more. But when you look around the shop, you know that it's being utilised at 120 per cent of its potential  already." The answer, then, was in remodelling traditional retail stores. Gargiya offers additional services such as micro-ATM, digital payments, insurance and credit options to not only create multiple revenue opportunities, but also tackle roadblocks hindering the growth of micro-businesses.