Dove | Payments brought offline to users

Dove is an offline payment service, built on the top of PayTM APIs, which can be used on any mobile device (including legacy mobile devices which don't even have a GUI or provisions for internet connectivity) without installing any additional application.

We intended to target the demographics who don't own a smartphone or have proper internet access, staying true to "Building for India", the hackathon's theme.

Our efforts also highlighted a way for PayTM to increase their user-base.

This was possible due to SMS capabilities in every mobile device, hence we hacked on that to make and receive payments easily using a simple keyword dove.

We built this using :

• Sinatra, Web framework for Ruby.
• Redis, In-memory key-value data store.

We also used the following to imitate an SMS gateway :

• Twilio, cloud platform providing SMS APIs for text-messaging.
• A mobile application to route text-messages to a web-server.

Setup

Requirements:

• Ruby
• Redis
• bundler gem

Installation:

1. Run rake install. It will install bundler if you have not it installed and install needed gems.
2. Rename config.json.sample to config.json and replace XXXX with needed values.

Running:

1. Run the service with rake run or just rake in your console.

Current Scope

Register User

• Since registering a new user (unique : mobile number) is a 2-step process on PayTM, we implemented a similar logic.
• User can simply initiate the registration process by sending the following text to a PayTM dedicated number

dove (reg | registration) <email>

• Doing this results in the user receiving a SMS with an OTP. He/She needs to send this to the dedicated number in the following format.

dove validate <OTP>

Hooray! You successfully registered at PayTM (if you hadn't) and our service as well.

Check Available Balance

dove (bal | balance)

Send / Pay Money to another number

dove (send | pay)  <payee number> <amount>

Impact

According to a survey conducted by The Hindu in 2011, around 83.3 crore people still live in Rural India. In another survey by LiveMint, only 45% people in India owned a smartphone in 2013.

It seems we have created a possible user-base of around 83.3 crore people for PayTM. :v: