Bengaluru, July 02: ToneTag, India’s deep-tech platform, today announced the launch of eKosha, a voice-first business assistant for merchants that enables banks to deliver a full range of merchant banking services directly at the merchant counter without requiring new infrastructure investment.
Building on ToneTag’s vision to transform payment acceptance, eKosha turns every merchant counter into an intelligent, full-service banking endpoint, powered by ToneTag’s proprietary analog Edge AI and contextual intelligence. At its core, eKosha reimagines conventional payment acceptance devices as intelligent banking touchpoints, enabling banks to engage with merchants directly at the point of business.
With more than 80 million MSMEs in India, banks have a significant opportunity to expand merchant services and strengthen everyday banking interactions. eKosha addresses this by transforming the payment acceptance point into a daily banking engagement channel, enabling banks to serve, engage, and cross-sell to merchants through a single device. By creating this direct merchant engagement layer, eKosha reduces dependency on external aggregators and enables banks to own and strengthen merchant relationships more closely.
Combining payments, banking, and AI into a single device, eKosha delivers full banking capability at the point of payment with zero friction. It accepts UPI, UPI 123Pay, and CBDC payments while also functioning as an extended banking channel, enabling merchants to access instant support, essential banking services, personalised loans and credit, government schemes and benefits, direct access to brands, and business insights through natural voice conversations in their own language.
With eKosha, every transaction at the merchant counter becomes an opportunity not just for payments, but for banks to stay continuously connected with merchants, turning each interaction into a moment to inform, assist, and offer relevant financial products. In effect, the device becomes the bank’s relationship manager at the merchant counter, creating a continuous engagement layer that helps banks build richer merchant intelligence, enabling safer credit decisions and faster loan origination.
Speaking on the launch, Kumar Abhishek, Founder and CEO, ToneTag, said, “The merchant counter has always been at the centre of India’s commerce. With eKosha, we are reimagining it as the centre of merchant banking. For the first time, banks have a dedicated, always-on engagement channel embedded at the point where merchants conduct business every day, enabling access to banking services through simple, natural conversations in their own language. This fundamentally changes how banks serve, support, and build relationships with merchants, while helping them drive deeper engagement, improve service efficiency, and unlock new growth opportunities across their merchant ecosystem.”
eKosha integrates ToneTag’s Small Action Language Model (SALM), enabling natural language interactions across all Indian languages without requiring app downloads. What sets eKosha apart is ToneTag’s proprietary analog edge-compute architecture: rather than routing every request to the cloud, the device runs AI inference locally using analog compute, delivering real-time, fully offline voice interactions at a fraction of the energy and cost of conventional digital, cloud-dependent systems. Forged over a decade of transmitting secure data over soundwaves — an inherently analog medium — this analog edge-compute capability is ToneTag’s core differentiator: it enables reliable voice-led banking anywhere, even in low-connectivity environments, and cannot be easily replicated because it is earned through large-scale, real-world deployment rather than funded overnight. It is the foundation on which the next phase of edge-AI-led merchant banking is built.
Deployed directly by banks to merchants, eKosha requires no app, no digital literacy, and no change in merchant behaviour. As an extension of existing banking channels, it enables simpler and faster everyday banking interactions, making services more accessible to merchants.
Banks deploying eKosha can reduce merchant servicing costs by up to 60%, improve merchant stickiness, accelerate loan origination, double cross-sell per merchant, and reduce churn from 15–20% to 6–9% through continuous daily engagement. By improving retention and reducing churn, eKosha also helps banks lower merchant re-acquisition costs while strengthening long-term merchant relationships.
As banks look to deepen merchant engagement and unlock new growth opportunities, eKosha creates a scalable, always-on channel at the merchant counter, bringing together payments, banking, and AI — anchored by ToneTag’s unique analog edge-compute advantage — to power the next phase of merchant banking.