E-commerce concerns: CEO says ONDC a technological solution to prevent market concentration

Mumbai: State-promoted Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) on Thursday pitched as a medium to "prevent market concentration", a day after Union Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal expressed concerns on the growing muscle of e-commerce giants like Amazon.

The network democratizes access for all the sellers and makes it possible for any buyer to get the best possible deal for goods or a service, its managing director and chief executive T Koshy told reporters here.

Goyal on Wednesday flagged concerns about the social repercussions of the growing role of e-commerce platforms in the small traders-dominated economy like India fearing that many of them will be rendered jobless as a result of the growing importance.

Koshy explained that typically, platforms prefer few large suppliers and a large customer base which leads to a network effect and eventual dying out of small businesses.

Stating that this phenomenon is happening across the world and the developed world has chosen to regulate in such matters, Koshy said India is relying on an open architecture to tackle this.

Platforms innovate to maximize their own interest through concentration, and the same is against the natural order where diversity is the key and innovation is a continuous aspect, he said, adding that ONDC is different.

"(ONDC is) a technological solution to prevent market concentration," he said, adding that the newly introduced platform gives enormous opportunities for small businesses to participate and benefit from digital commerce.

Koshy, who was speaking on the sidelines of a financial services play launch by ONDC under which an unsecured loan can be availed in 6 minutes from small lenders, said the state-run platform is targeting to increase the monthly transactions to over 36 million from 12 million at present.

At present, three lenders and nine apps are on ONDC on the lending side, and efforts are on to add the number of lenders including the top ones.

Meanwhile, ONDC's senior vice president for financial services Hrushikesh Mehta said that after lending, the next aim for the platform is to make buying mutual funds and insurance possible.

The service to buy insurance and mutual funds will become operational in the next one or two months, he said, adding that work on the same is on at present.

On the lending side, it is working on a slew of use cases including crop loans, GST data-based credit etc, he said, adding that making it possible to buy credit cards will be the last of the offerings in the list.

For credit cards, payments major Mastercard has volunteered to help the ONDC find the right solution, Mehta said.