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Opinion | Business possibilities in a world of digital payments
Updated: 16 Jan 2020, 10:22 PM IST
By Kapil Viswanathan, Gaurav Raina
UPI has brought digital payments to the common man and it has immense scope for growth. As the mechanism is set to hit foreign shores, it has a chance of scoring a truly global success
Such advancements also open up endless possibilities for new business models. It’s the new Wild West, in a sense, and Indian entrepreneurs must get into the act now to seize the moment (Photo: Saumya Khandelwal/Hindustan Times)
Among the many travails being faced by our honourable finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman nowadays is the furore caused by her recent announcement of the zero merchant discount rate (MDR) policy for payments through RuPay debit cards and Unified Payments Interface (UPI) instruments. This policy dictates that when a consumer pays a merchant using RuPay or UPI, the bank may not charge the merchant a commission on the sale value that it usually charges a merchant, say, on a credit card transaction. Critics of this policy lament that it would begin to reverse the progress India has made in recent years to expand the digital payments network.
The debate over zero-MDR is one twist in a grand tale that dates back to 2008, when the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) was set up as an umbrella organization for operating retail payments and settlements in India. In 2016, NPCI introduced UPI, which has since registered 100 million users and now clocks more than 1 billion transactions every month.
According to the NITI Aayog, mobile payments in India are expected to grow nearly 20-fold to $190 billion in the next three years. Of the nearly one billion mobile phone users in India, smartphone users barely outnumber feature phone users. These 420 million feature phone users can use the *99# USSD service to dial into 13 different languages, which would connect them to UPI. This brings digital payments to the common man and thus plays an important role in bringing greater financial inclusion in the country.
Yet, we are far behind, say, China, where 55% of spending is done digitally, compared to only 11% in India. While the progress made in recent years is substantial, the outlook for future growth is mind-boggling. To capitalize on this opportunity, innovation is necessary at three levels—adoption, policy and technology. A better understanding of human behaviour, technology, use cases and dis-use cases will facilitate the 10x growth necessary in adoption rates to cover the entire population. The government has the rare opportunity to develop a data-centric understanding of how the economy conducts itself and uses money, and can set taxes accordingly. At the technology level, there is an opportunity to use voice as a means for authentication and conduct transactions across multiple local languages. Copious amounts of data from payment transactions can be analysed to understand user needs and develop personalized loans and financial solutions at scale.
Interestingly, the opportunity is not national in scope. Rather, it is global. The NCPI is gearing up to take UPI to other countries, beginning with Singapore and the United Arab Emirates. The low hanging fruit is to provide payment solutions to Indians travelling abroad. However, the bigger and tougher game is to increase its usage among local people in countries outside India. This would put UPI in competition with the likes of PayPal and Skrill. Last month, Google famously suggested to the US Federal Reserve Board that they consider setting up a real-time payments system modelled on India’s UPI. For now, NCPI is working with its counterpart in Singapore, the Network for Electronic Transfers for Singapore, to bring UPI live in Singapore.
At a more abstract level, if one were to take a step back and reflect on the growth story of mobile payments, an unmissable (or unlikely, depending on how one thinks about it) parallel emerges. The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, better known as Arpanet, was an early packet-switching network dating back to the late 1960s, which established the first ever computer-to-computer link using a protocol suite known as TCP/IP. Arpanet and TCP/IP became the technological foundation of the internet as we know it today. They did so because they facilitated the transfer of even small amounts of data to anyone, anywhere. The internet today has expanded substantially in scope and scale since those early days and supports popular use cases such as search engines, emails, video streaming, e-commerce and social media.
In a similar way, a product such as UPI facilitates the transfer of even small amounts of money to anyone, anywhere, in a manner that is easy, fast, and secure. If the Arpanet grew to ultimately become the internet, what can UPI ultimately become? What are the new business models that may emerge from such a platform? The possibilities are endless. Peer-to-peer marketplaces and the much feted and subsequently maligned “C2C" business models of the dot-com boom era could become a reality, as could peer-to-peer lending platforms, matching lenders with borrowers at an aggregate or individual level. Individual market participants could publish their personal balance sheets and income statements, as users post updates on social media today. Add to this the possibilities presented by the emergence and adoption of technologies such as blockchain, and you have a future that looks nothing like the present.
We have seen just the tip, albeit a very substantial tip, of the digital payments iceberg. In the coming years, young business leaders of today must learn to uncover the iceberg itself, and perhaps be prepared to discover that it is in fact not just a new Antarctica, but the new Wild West.
Kapil Viswanathan and Gaurav Raina are, respectively, vice-chairman of Krea University and chairman of Mobile Payments Forum of India
Opinion | Business possibilities in a world of digital payments
Updated: 16 Jan 2020, 10:22 PM IST
By Kapil Viswanathan, Gaurav Raina
UPI has brought digital payments to the common man and it has immense scope for growth. As the mechanism is set to hit foreign shores, it has a chance of scoring a truly global success
Such advancements also open up endless possibilities for new business models. It’s the new Wild West, in a sense, and Indian entrepreneurs must get into the act now to seize the moment (Photo: Saumya Khandelwal/Hindustan Times)
Among the many travails being faced by our honourable finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman nowadays is the furore caused by her recent announcement of the zero merchant discount rate (MDR) policy for payments through RuPay debit cards and Unified Payments Interface (UPI) instruments. This policy dictates that when a consumer pays a merchant using RuPay or UPI, the bank may not charge the merchant a commission on the sale value that it usually charges a merchant, say, on a credit card transaction. Critics of this policy lament that it would begin to reverse the progress India has made in recent years to expand the digital payments network.
The debate over zero-MDR is one twist in a grand tale that dates back to 2008, when the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) was set up as an umbrella organization for operating retail payments and settlements in India. In 2016, NPCI introduced UPI, which has since registered 100 million users and now clocks more than 1 billion transactions every month.
According to the NITI Aayog, mobile payments in India are expected to grow nearly 20-fold to $190 billion in the next three years. Of the nearly one billion mobile phone users in India, smartphone users barely outnumber feature phone users. These 420 million feature phone users can use the *99# USSD service to dial into 13 different languages, which would connect them to UPI. This brings digital payments to the common man and thus plays an important role in bringing greater financial inclusion in the country.
Yet, we are far behind, say, China, where 55% of spending is done digitally, compared to only 11% in India. While the progress made in recent years is substantial, the outlook for future growth is mind-boggling. To capitalize on this opportunity, innovation is necessary at three levels—adoption, policy and technology. A better understanding of human behaviour, technology, use cases and dis-use cases will facilitate the 10x growth necessary in adoption rates to cover the entire population. The government has the rare opportunity to develop a data-centric understanding of how the economy conducts itself and uses money, and can set taxes accordingly. At the technology level, there is an opportunity to use voice as a means for authentication and conduct transactions across multiple local languages. Copious amounts of data from payment transactions can be analysed to understand user needs and develop personalized loans and financial solutions at scale.
Interestingly, the opportunity is not national in scope. Rather, it is global. The NCPI is gearing up to take UPI to other countries, beginning with Singapore and the United Arab Emirates. The low hanging fruit is to provide payment solutions to Indians travelling abroad. However, the bigger and tougher game is to increase its usage among local people in countries outside India. This would put UPI in competition with the likes of PayPal and Skrill. Last month, Google famously suggested to the US Federal Reserve Board that they consider setting up a real-time payments system modelled on India’s UPI. For now, NCPI is working with its counterpart in Singapore, the Network for Electronic Transfers for Singapore, to bring UPI live in Singapore.
At a more abstract level, if one were to take a step back and reflect on the growth story of mobile payments, an unmissable (or unlikely, depending on how one thinks about it) parallel emerges. The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, better known as Arpanet, was an early packet-switching network dating back to the late 1960s, which established the first ever computer-to-computer link using a protocol suite known as TCP/IP. Arpanet and TCP/IP became the technological foundation of the internet as we know it today. They did so because they facilitated the transfer of even small amounts of data to anyone, anywhere. The internet today has expanded substantially in scope and scale since those early days and supports popular use cases such as search engines, emails, video streaming, e-commerce and social media.
In a similar way, a product such as UPI facilitates the transfer of even small amounts of money to anyone, anywhere, in a manner that is easy, fast, and secure. If the Arpanet grew to ultimately become the internet, what can UPI ultimately become? What are the new business models that may emerge from such a platform? The possibilities are endless. Peer-to-peer marketplaces and the much feted and subsequently maligned “C2C" business models of the dot-com boom era could become a reality, as could peer-to-peer lending platforms, matching lenders with borrowers at an aggregate or individual level. Individual market participants could publish their personal balance sheets and income statements, as users post updates on social media today. Add to this the possibilities presented by the emergence and adoption of technologies such as blockchain, and you have a future that looks nothing like the present.
We have seen just the tip, albeit a very substantial tip, of the digital payments iceberg. In the coming years, young business leaders of today must learn to uncover the iceberg itself, and perhaps be prepared to discover that it is in fact not just a new Antarctica, but the new Wild West.
Kapil Viswanathan and Gaurav Raina are, respectively, vice-chairman of Krea University and chairman of Mobile Payments Forum of India
Opinion | Business possibilities in a world of digital payments
Now, Indian govt wants to create data refineries using people's data
IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad wants India to create data refineries, and while the data seems to be connected to the commercialization of people's data that Indian government is hinting at for a while, the minister didn't elaborate his comments.
India Today Tech, New Delhi
January 21, 2020 18:47 IST
HIGHLIGHTS
Data refinery what? We are also thinking on the same lines. Today IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said that he wanted to see India become a top place for "data refineries". Although the minister did not clarify what he meant by term "data refinery" or "data refining," it seems that this could be connected to the Indian government plans to commercialize data generated by Indians.
The minister made his comments at an event hosted by NIC (National Informatics Centre). Information comes courtesy a tweet made from the minister's official Twitter account. "It is my great ambition that India should become a big centre of data analytics, data cleaning and data anonymization. I foresee India becoming a big centre of data refinery (and) data refining process. I want NIC to work in that direction," Prasad said in the video clip attached with the tweet.
It is not clear what the minister meant by "data refining" or "data refinery". It could be one of the two things. One, it is possible that the minister was talking about sorting and categorisation of information and big data analysis, something that companies like Google and Facebook often do in Silicon Valley. Maybe the minister wants India to become a leader in data analytics.
Or the minister was probably talking about the commercialization of data that Indian generate, an idea that has gained currency in the last few years. There are signs -- and reports -- that the Indian government wants to commercialize data generated by Indians for various purposes, including for commercial gains to the people who generate this data. The idea is that "data is the new oil" and that the data generated by people in a country can be used as a national resource.
Recently, there were reports that the Ministry of Electronics and IT, which Prasad heads, was considering rules that would force companies like Facebook and Google that have collected a lot of data from Indian users to provide this data to other companies at a fee.
The idea, something that Nandan Nilekani, the architect of the Aadhaar project, highlighted well a few years ago is that people should have the ability to sell or barter their data. In 2018, at a tech conference in Kerala, Nilekani had said that in India poor people should be able to sell their data for monetary benefits. For example, in return for giving access to their location data, which could be used for targeted advertisements, people should be able to get discounts from a restaurant or a shop. Similarly, in return for sharing some vital data that a user had created, he or she could be given hospital treatment at a lower cost, or an insurance policy with better coverage, Nilekani had suggested.
The Indian government too, it seems, is looking to sell processed data that has been anonymised to anyone willing to pay a good price. Last year, the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways revealed that it sold vehicle registration data of Indians to 87 private and 32 government entities and earned Rs 65 crore.
Now, Indian govt wants to create data refineries using people's data
IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad wants India to create data refineries, and while the data seems to be connected to the commercialization of people's data that Indian government is hinting at for a while, the minister didn't elaborate his comments.
India Today Tech, New Delhi
January 21, 2020 18:47 IST
HIGHLIGHTS
- IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad believes that India can be a centre of data refining and many data refineries can be created here.
- The minister did not elaborate what he meant by data refinery, but it seems to connected to commercialization of data.
- The minister made his remarks at an event hosted by NIC (National Informatics Centre)
Data refinery what? We are also thinking on the same lines. Today IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said that he wanted to see India become a top place for "data refineries". Although the minister did not clarify what he meant by term "data refinery" or "data refining," it seems that this could be connected to the Indian government plans to commercialize data generated by Indians.
The minister made his comments at an event hosted by NIC (National Informatics Centre). Information comes courtesy a tweet made from the minister's official Twitter account. "It is my great ambition that India should become a big centre of data analytics, data cleaning and data anonymization. I foresee India becoming a big centre of data refinery (and) data refining process. I want NIC to work in that direction," Prasad said in the video clip attached with the tweet.
It is not clear what the minister meant by "data refining" or "data refinery". It could be one of the two things. One, it is possible that the minister was talking about sorting and categorisation of information and big data analysis, something that companies like Google and Facebook often do in Silicon Valley. Maybe the minister wants India to become a leader in data analytics.
Or the minister was probably talking about the commercialization of data that Indian generate, an idea that has gained currency in the last few years. There are signs -- and reports -- that the Indian government wants to commercialize data generated by Indians for various purposes, including for commercial gains to the people who generate this data. The idea is that "data is the new oil" and that the data generated by people in a country can be used as a national resource.
Recently, there were reports that the Ministry of Electronics and IT, which Prasad heads, was considering rules that would force companies like Facebook and Google that have collected a lot of data from Indian users to provide this data to other companies at a fee.
The idea, something that Nandan Nilekani, the architect of the Aadhaar project, highlighted well a few years ago is that people should have the ability to sell or barter their data. In 2018, at a tech conference in Kerala, Nilekani had said that in India poor people should be able to sell their data for monetary benefits. For example, in return for giving access to their location data, which could be used for targeted advertisements, people should be able to get discounts from a restaurant or a shop. Similarly, in return for sharing some vital data that a user had created, he or she could be given hospital treatment at a lower cost, or an insurance policy with better coverage, Nilekani had suggested.
The Indian government too, it seems, is looking to sell processed data that has been anonymised to anyone willing to pay a good price. Last year, the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways revealed that it sold vehicle registration data of Indians to 87 private and 32 government entities and earned Rs 65 crore.
Now, Indian govt wants to create data refineries using people's data
India to create its own WhatsApp ! Govt proposes its alternative service for secure messagingGovernment testing GIMs, its secure messaging app
GIMS is being packaged for employees of Central and state government departments and organisations for intra and inter organisation communications.
Written by Anil Sasi | New Delhi | Updated: December 16, 2019 7:23:23 am
GIMS is being packaged for employees of Central and state government departments and organisations for intra and inter organisation communications. (Representational)
The government is testing a prototype of an Indian equivalent of popular messaging platforms, such as WhatsApp and Telegram, for secure internal use. Codenamed GIMS or Government Instant Messaging System, the platform is in the pilot testing stage across some states, including Odisha — and is learnt to have been released to the Indian Navy to be tried out on trial basis.
Designed and developed by the Kerala unit of National Informatics Centre (NIC), GIMS is being packaged for employees of Central and state government departments and organisations for intra and inter organisation communications.
It is being developed as a secure Indian alternative without the security concerns attached with apps hosted abroad or those owned by foreign entities. Like WhatsApp, GIMS employs end-to-end encryption for one-to-one messaging.
The launch of the new app comes amid the recent controversy over the WhatsApp breach after The Indian Express first reported that some Indian users’ mobile devices were targeted through a spyware called Pegasus.
GIMS is being touted as a safer bet as the platform has been developed in India, the server hosting it is installed within the country and the information stored would be in government-based cloud — NIC-operated data centres that are only meant for captive use by the government and its departments.
The trial started with NIC employees using it internally, before expanding it to some central government agencies, including the finance department of Odisha and the Navy.
A GIMS Portal is also being simultaneously developed for administration and monitoring of the platform, government officials said.
The platform is adaptable to both central and state government organisations, with an iOS version of GIMS released for trial in the first week of September 2019, compatible with iOS Version 11 and above, and an Android version that works with Kitkat (Android 4.4.4) and above.
Sources said the Odisha Finance Department had cleared plans to use GIMS in the department on pilot basis. State officials are learnt to have been asked to install GIMS and start using it since end-September, and NIC is learnt to have formed a group of all Finance department officials of the state so that group interactions can be tested.
Facebook-owned WhatsApp has been the default instant messaging platform among a majority of government departments and organisations. But tax department officers and those with enforcement agencies are reported to be more inclined to use Telegram (London-headquartered cloud-based instant messaging and voice over IP service), and now increasingly Signal (the Mountain View, California-headquartered cross-platform encrypted messaging service).
Besides one-to-one messaging and group messaging, there are specific provisions in GIMS for documents and media sharing in keeping with the hierarchies in the government system.
According to WhatsApp, the Pegasus spyware was developed by Israel-based NSO Group and it attempted to breach mobile phones of a possible 1,400 users globally, including 121 from India.
Based on reports on alleged snooping of mobile devices of Indian citizens through WhatsApp using Pegasus, CERT-In (Indian Computer Emergency Response Team) has said it had sought submission of relevant details and information from WhatsApp and NSO group.
Government testing GIMs, its secure messaging app
By: Rishi Ranjan Kala | Updated: January 23, 2020 8:55:54 AM
GIMS, which is currently under testing, will be used by govt departments for secure official communication
Apart from Central government offices and departments, GIMS may also be used by state governments if they so desire, sources said.
To improve confidentiality in official communications, the government is in the process of setting up its own instant messaging service for mobile phones. The platform, for which pilot tests are currently being conducted by the ministry of electronics and information technology (MeitY), will be named Government Instant Messaging Service (GIMS) and is expected to be rolled out later this year.
Apart from Central government offices and departments, GIMS may also be used by state governments if they so desire, sources said.
GIMS is a unified messaging platform being developed by the National Informatics Centre (NIC), which also set up the e-mail service for government departments. Currently, the NIC-created government e-mail service handles more than 2 crore emails daily.
A senior government official said that GIMS has been built through an open source solution in accordance with the policy on adoption of open source software for government by MeitY, thus, ensuring government’s strategic control over the solution. It provides a multilingual platform with 11 local languages and a go-live in English and Hindi initially that will be followed by other languages.
“The app (GIMS) has been developed for both Android and iOS platforms and at present beta testing is going on. A total of 17 government organisations including ministry of external affairs (MEA), ministry of home affairs (MHA), CBI, MeitY, Navy and railways are participating in the testing. Currently, there are around 6,600 users who have generated close to 20 lakh messages,” the official added.
States like Odisha and Gujarat are also participating in the beta testing, the official said.
A former government official, who has handled cyber security threats against the government in the past, said that such a service is very important, especially in light of software like Pegasus, which can be used to snoop on conversations on WhatsApp.
“Today, almost every ministry has its own chat group on commercial platforms like WhatsApp, WeChat, etc. Often officials discuss strategic and sensitive issues on these platforms. With cyber criminals or rogue states targeting such communication, it is high time India has its own government instant messaging service. Such services are crucial today for effective and efficient administration,” he explained.
India to create its own WhatsApp! Govt proposes its alternative service for secure messaging
They should start with making aadhar app secure.India to create its own WhatsApp ! Govt proposes its alternative service for secure messaging
By: Rishi Ranjan Kala | Updated: January 23, 2020 8:55:54 AM
GIMS, which is currently under testing, will be used by govt departments for secure official communication
Apart from Central government offices and departments, GIMS may also be used by state governments if they so desire, sources said.
To improve confidentiality in official communications, the government is in the process of setting up its own instant messaging service for mobile phones. The platform, for which pilot tests are currently being conducted by the ministry of electronics and information technology (MeitY), will be named Government Instant Messaging Service (GIMS) and is expected to be rolled out later this year.
Apart from Central government offices and departments, GIMS may also be used by state governments if they so desire, sources said.
GIMS is a unified messaging platform being developed by the National Informatics Centre (NIC), which also set up the e-mail service for government departments. Currently, the NIC-created government e-mail service handles more than 2 crore emails daily.
A senior government official said that GIMS has been built through an open source solution in accordance with the policy on adoption of open source software for government by MeitY, thus, ensuring government’s strategic control over the solution. It provides a multilingual platform with 11 local languages and a go-live in English and Hindi initially that will be followed by other languages.
“The app (GIMS) has been developed for both Android and iOS platforms and at present beta testing is going on. A total of 17 government organisations including ministry of external affairs (MEA), ministry of home affairs (MHA), CBI, MeitY, Navy and railways are participating in the testing. Currently, there are around 6,600 users who have generated close to 20 lakh messages,” the official added.
States like Odisha and Gujarat are also participating in the beta testing, the official said.
A former government official, who has handled cyber security threats against the government in the past, said that such a service is very important, especially in light of software like Pegasus, which can be used to snoop on conversations on WhatsApp.
“Today, almost every ministry has its own chat group on commercial platforms like WhatsApp, WeChat, etc. Often officials discuss strategic and sensitive issues on these platforms. With cyber criminals or rogue states targeting such communication, it is high time India has its own government instant messaging service. Such services are crucial today for effective and efficient administration,” he explained.
India to create its own WhatsApp! Govt proposes its alternative service for secure messaging
Google Pay India learnings will be taken to global markets
Google will take lessons from the success of its Google Pay platform in India to other global markets, said Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai in a post-earnings analyst call on Monday.
“We've had a lot of traction with our payments product over the past 18 months. We had a tremendously successful launch in India from which we learned a lot of features, and we are bringing that and we are revamping our payments products globally,” said Pichai speaking to analysts after the company’s fourth quarter earnings. “And so I'm excited by that rollout, which is coming up in 2020. I think that will make the experience better.” Alphabet is the parent company of Google.
Google Pay in India runs on the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), the open digital payments platform built by National Payments Corporation of India. The value of transactions through the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) rose 6.78% month-on-month to Rs 2.16 lakh crore in January from Rs 2.02 lakh crore to December, 2019.
Google Pay has nearly 60% marketshare in the UPI-based digital payments market in India, followed by Walmart-owned PhonePe and Paytm, according to a September report by payment gateway Razorpay.
India is the only country that has adopted the UPI-based payments system that allows users to transfer as low as Re 1 to another user through their bank account. It is still unclear the model adopted by Google Pay in other countries.
Last year, Google wrote to the US Federal Reserve Board urging it to build ‘FedNow’ - an interbank real-time gross settlement service (RTGS) for digital payments in the US similar to the UPI-based digital payments platform.
According to an earlier comment by a company official last year, Google Pay’s monthly active user-base had grown three-fold to reach 67 million in September 2019 from 22 million in September 2018.
Google parent- Alphabet reported its fourth quarter earnings on Monday. The company’s revenue grew from $39.3 billion in 2018 to $46.1 billion in 2019.
Google Pay India learnings will be taken to global markets: Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai
Google will take lessons from the success of its Google Pay platform in India to other global markets, said Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai in a post-earnings analyst call on Monday.
“We've had a lot of traction with our payments product over the past 18 months. We had a tremendously successful launch in India from which we learned a lot of features, and we are bringing that and we are revamping our payments products globally,” said Pichai speaking to analysts after the company’s fourth quarter earnings. “And so I'm excited by that rollout, which is coming up in 2020. I think that will make the experience better.” Alphabet is the parent company of Google.
Google Pay in India runs on the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), the open digital payments platform built by National Payments Corporation of India. The value of transactions through the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) rose 6.78% month-on-month to Rs 2.16 lakh crore in January from Rs 2.02 lakh crore to December, 2019.
Google Pay has nearly 60% marketshare in the UPI-based digital payments market in India, followed by Walmart-owned PhonePe and Paytm, according to a September report by payment gateway Razorpay.
India is the only country that has adopted the UPI-based payments system that allows users to transfer as low as Re 1 to another user through their bank account. It is still unclear the model adopted by Google Pay in other countries.
Last year, Google wrote to the US Federal Reserve Board urging it to build ‘FedNow’ - an interbank real-time gross settlement service (RTGS) for digital payments in the US similar to the UPI-based digital payments platform.
According to an earlier comment by a company official last year, Google Pay’s monthly active user-base had grown three-fold to reach 67 million in September 2019 from 22 million in September 2018.
Google parent- Alphabet reported its fourth quarter earnings on Monday. The company’s revenue grew from $39.3 billion in 2018 to $46.1 billion in 2019.
Google Pay India learnings will be taken to global markets: Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai
WhatsApp Pay set for phased roll out in India; granted NPCI permission
Facebook-owned messaging service WhatsApp has secured regulatory approval for launching its digital payment platform — WhatApp Pay — in a phased manner, close to two years after the US-based company’s pilot run.
The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) granted permission to the California-headquartered company on Thursday to operate WhatsApp Pay, which will cater to 10 million users in India during the first phase, a person in the know said.
The NPCI approval follows the Reserve Bank of India’s go-ahead. WhatsApp has assured the RBI and NPCI that it will comply with the data localisation norms, a source said. WhatsApp’s resistance to the government’s stand on data localisation was a key reason behind the delay in the company’s payment service launch.
“If WhatsApp is able to fulfil the compliance requirements, the messaging platform will be able to do a full roll-out,” the source said. Neither WhatsApp nor NPCI responded to Business Standard queries on the subject.
Once WhatsApp is able to do a full roll-out of the payment service, it’s expected to capture the lion’s share in that space. The messaging service giant, which was bought by Mark Zuckerberg-led Facebook for $21 billion in 2014, counts India as its biggest market with more than 400 million users.
WhatsApp’s phased rollout of the payment service is linked to its large user base. The firm wants to scale up its payments operations once the infrastructure is equipped to handle the load of transactions, an official said. WhatsApp Pay, based on the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) standard, is different from other apps that offer payment services. UPI, developed by NPCI, lets bank account holders send or receive money electronically without entering their net banking user ID or password.
So far, Google Pay (launched in 2017 as Tez) has been the most used and growing UPI app in India, followed by Walmart-owned PhonePe, Paytm and NPCI-created BHIM. All or most of these apps have acquired users from the ground up, giving banks time and opportunity to scale up as the transaction volume rises. As for Paytm, the subscriber numbers were not as high as WhatsApp when it launched UPI. Paytm had about 280 wallet users at the time and not all of them switched to UPI.
In the case of WhatsApp, the user base is already large and a phased rollout will hep ensure banks can scale up their systems as users start transacting. Payments through WhatsApp were introduced to a million users as a part of trial run in February 2018.
WhatsApp Pay’s beta run
WhatsApp started its trial run by partnering with ICICI Bank, while awaiting the regulatory nod to go live. After a long wait, things started firming up late last year. In October 2019, a third-party security audit, okayed by the RBI, was performed by one of the Big Four consultancies to check for security compliance of WhatsApp Pay, it’s learnt. In the meantime, WhatsApp worked with the government and its own teams to resolve issues around data processing compliance.
The move to roll out WhatsApp Pay to a wider user base will put the American social media giant in direct competition with players like Alphabet’s Google Pay, Walmart-owned PhonePe, Amazon Pay and Alibaba-backed Paytm. These companies are already locked in a fierce battle to dominate the digital payments space in India.
As of last May, according to news reports, Google Pay saw over 240 million UPI transactions in the month, PhonePe recorded around 230 million while Paytm numbers were pegged at 200 million. Last week, speaking during an earnings call, Zuckerberg said WhatsApp Pay was expected to be launched in a number of countries over the next six months. "We got approval to test this (payment services) with one million people in India back in 2018. And when so many of the people kept using it week after week, we knew it was going to be big when we get to launch," Zuckerberg had said, in a sure shot indication that the big rollout was close by.
WhatsApp Pay set for phased roll out in India; granted NPCI permission
Facebook-owned messaging service WhatsApp has secured regulatory approval for launching its digital payment platform — WhatApp Pay — in a phased manner, close to two years after the US-based company’s pilot run.
The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) granted permission to the California-headquartered company on Thursday to operate WhatsApp Pay, which will cater to 10 million users in India during the first phase, a person in the know said.
The NPCI approval follows the Reserve Bank of India’s go-ahead. WhatsApp has assured the RBI and NPCI that it will comply with the data localisation norms, a source said. WhatsApp’s resistance to the government’s stand on data localisation was a key reason behind the delay in the company’s payment service launch.
“If WhatsApp is able to fulfil the compliance requirements, the messaging platform will be able to do a full roll-out,” the source said. Neither WhatsApp nor NPCI responded to Business Standard queries on the subject.
Once WhatsApp is able to do a full roll-out of the payment service, it’s expected to capture the lion’s share in that space. The messaging service giant, which was bought by Mark Zuckerberg-led Facebook for $21 billion in 2014, counts India as its biggest market with more than 400 million users.
WhatsApp’s phased rollout of the payment service is linked to its large user base. The firm wants to scale up its payments operations once the infrastructure is equipped to handle the load of transactions, an official said. WhatsApp Pay, based on the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) standard, is different from other apps that offer payment services. UPI, developed by NPCI, lets bank account holders send or receive money electronically without entering their net banking user ID or password.
So far, Google Pay (launched in 2017 as Tez) has been the most used and growing UPI app in India, followed by Walmart-owned PhonePe, Paytm and NPCI-created BHIM. All or most of these apps have acquired users from the ground up, giving banks time and opportunity to scale up as the transaction volume rises. As for Paytm, the subscriber numbers were not as high as WhatsApp when it launched UPI. Paytm had about 280 wallet users at the time and not all of them switched to UPI.
In the case of WhatsApp, the user base is already large and a phased rollout will hep ensure banks can scale up their systems as users start transacting. Payments through WhatsApp were introduced to a million users as a part of trial run in February 2018.
WhatsApp Pay’s beta run
WhatsApp started its trial run by partnering with ICICI Bank, while awaiting the regulatory nod to go live. After a long wait, things started firming up late last year. In October 2019, a third-party security audit, okayed by the RBI, was performed by one of the Big Four consultancies to check for security compliance of WhatsApp Pay, it’s learnt. In the meantime, WhatsApp worked with the government and its own teams to resolve issues around data processing compliance.
The move to roll out WhatsApp Pay to a wider user base will put the American social media giant in direct competition with players like Alphabet’s Google Pay, Walmart-owned PhonePe, Amazon Pay and Alibaba-backed Paytm. These companies are already locked in a fierce battle to dominate the digital payments space in India.
As of last May, according to news reports, Google Pay saw over 240 million UPI transactions in the month, PhonePe recorded around 230 million while Paytm numbers were pegged at 200 million. Last week, speaking during an earnings call, Zuckerberg said WhatsApp Pay was expected to be launched in a number of countries over the next six months. "We got approval to test this (payment services) with one million people in India back in 2018. And when so many of the people kept using it week after week, we knew it was going to be big when we get to launch," Zuckerberg had said, in a sure shot indication that the big rollout was close by.
WhatsApp Pay set for phased roll out in India; granted NPCI permission
India has crossed a billion monthly digital payments. Now, to a billion transactions a day
Google’s letter to the US Federal Reserve two months ago asking them to learn from Indian digital payments must be an unfamiliar feeling for the central bank. Indian regulators, used to lectures and advocacy from global firms and diplomats peddling their models — not intellectually different from Thomas Macaulay’s quip in 1835 that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India — should be proud of reaching our target of a billion monthly digital payments. We make the case that digital payment transactions on the Universal Payment Interface (UPI) platform rising from 0.1 million in October 2016 to 1.3 billion in January 2020 represents the magic of entrepreneurs, nonprofits and policymakers working together. And gives us a new target — a billion transactions a day.
India was long a financially excluded nation — only 17 per cent of Indians had a bank account in 2011. The World Bank suggests it would have taken 50 more years for 80 per cent of Indians to get a bank account at the pre-2011 speed. Yet, we reached that milestone in 2018. How? A magical combination of political will (Jan Dhana Yojana and Aadhaar embedding), a proactive central bank (creating a non-profit market participant entity and leveling the playing field between non-banks and banks), and a technology stack with three layers (identity, payments, and data).
India’s payment revolution comes from a clear vision (shifting the system from low volume, high value, and high cost to high volume, low value, low cost), a clear strategy (regulated and unregulated private players innovating on top of public infrastructure) and trade-offs balanced by design (regulation vs innovation, privacy vs personalisation, and ease-of-use vs fraud prevention). Consumers wanted a payment experience that was mobile-first, low-cost, 24/7, instant, convenient, interoperable, fintech friendly, inside banking, and safe. This was UPI, a platform operated by the entrepreneurial nonprofit National Payments Corporation of India. UPI created interoperability between all sources and recipients of funds (consumers, businesses, fintechs, wallets, 140 member banks), settled instantly inside the central bank in fiat money (state-issued money declared by the sovereign to be legal tender) and blunted data monopolies (big tech firms have strong autonomy but weak fiduciary responsibilities over customer data). A new paper by the Bank for International Settlements (‘The design of digital financial infrastructure: lessons from India’) suggests that India demonstrates how “a central bank can be proactive and equal partners with private sector counterparts when it comes to fostering technological innovation in finance”.
UPI offers five policy lessons. First, how the India stack — interconnected yet independent platforms or open APIs — are a public good that lowers costs, spurs innovation, and blunts the natural digital winner-takes-all. Replicating this in education, healthcare, and government services are likely to be a harbinger of large scale multi-domain collaborative innovation. Second, collaboration can create ecosystems that overcome the birth defects of its constituents — the execution deficit of government, the trust deficit of private companies, and the scale deficit of nonprofits. Third, complementary policy interventions are important. Demonetisation and GST are changing the stories that firms and individuals tell themselves around cash and informality. Fourth, human capital and diversity matter. This revolution needed career bureaucrats to partner with academics, tech entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, global giants and private firms. The final lesson is that India doesn’t need to be Western or Chinese to be modern. If our policymakers had copied Alipay or US banks, we wouldn’t have leapfrogged their birth defects.
Google’s letter to the Federal Reserve counters powerful lobbying by US banks against the “FedNow” payment system that will undermine their supernormal profits. FedNow will do far less than UPI, but its launch delay supports the thesis of the new book, The Great Reversal, by Thomas Philippon that American capitalism, once a model for the world, is giving up on healthy competition. Many sectors are more concentrated than 20 years ago, dominated by fewer and bigger players who lobby politicians aggressively to protect and expand their profit margins. But capitalism without competition — India has seen that movie before — hurts growth, investments, productivity and wages.
There is more work to be done. The central government must deadline digitising all its payments. The RBI must implement the 100-plus action items arising from its own Vision 2021 document and the Nandan Nilekani Committee for Deepening Digital Payments. It must also make UPI and RuPay fit for use in our $70 billion inward remittances that currently come through exploitative financial institutions which don’t have clients but hostages. More importantly, the RBI must replicate the core design of UPI — fierce but sustainable private and public competition — in bank credit because our 50 per cent credit-to -GDP ratio is one of the reasons India is poor. China’s 300 per cent is the wrong number, but reaching the OECD average of 100 per cent needs the RBI to do many things — raising its human capital and technology game in regulation and supervision, catalysing an ecosystem for lending against the rapidly expanding digital exhaust of small firms and individuals, issuing more private bank licences, facilitating management changes in old private banks with market caps that signal questions about book value, and shepherding a governance and human capital revolution at PSU banks (their risk-weighted assets being lower than two years ago despite a capital injection of Rs 2.5 lakh crore should be unacceptable).
Converting the collective independence our citizens got in 1947 to individual freedom surely involved universal financial inclusion. The gap between this aspiration and reality was not a lie but a disappointment because our capital got handicapped without labour and our labour got handicapped without capital. Change has begun – the RBI, the finance ministry, and many individuals deserve our gratitude and duas for a billion digital payments a month. We now ask you for a billion digital payments a day.
India has crossed a billion monthly digital payments. Now, to a billion transactions a day
Google’s letter to the US Federal Reserve two months ago asking them to learn from Indian digital payments must be an unfamiliar feeling for the central bank. Indian regulators, used to lectures and advocacy from global firms and diplomats peddling their models — not intellectually different from Thomas Macaulay’s quip in 1835 that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India — should be proud of reaching our target of a billion monthly digital payments. We make the case that digital payment transactions on the Universal Payment Interface (UPI) platform rising from 0.1 million in October 2016 to 1.3 billion in January 2020 represents the magic of entrepreneurs, nonprofits and policymakers working together. And gives us a new target — a billion transactions a day.
India was long a financially excluded nation — only 17 per cent of Indians had a bank account in 2011. The World Bank suggests it would have taken 50 more years for 80 per cent of Indians to get a bank account at the pre-2011 speed. Yet, we reached that milestone in 2018. How? A magical combination of political will (Jan Dhana Yojana and Aadhaar embedding), a proactive central bank (creating a non-profit market participant entity and leveling the playing field between non-banks and banks), and a technology stack with three layers (identity, payments, and data).
India’s payment revolution comes from a clear vision (shifting the system from low volume, high value, and high cost to high volume, low value, low cost), a clear strategy (regulated and unregulated private players innovating on top of public infrastructure) and trade-offs balanced by design (regulation vs innovation, privacy vs personalisation, and ease-of-use vs fraud prevention). Consumers wanted a payment experience that was mobile-first, low-cost, 24/7, instant, convenient, interoperable, fintech friendly, inside banking, and safe. This was UPI, a platform operated by the entrepreneurial nonprofit National Payments Corporation of India. UPI created interoperability between all sources and recipients of funds (consumers, businesses, fintechs, wallets, 140 member banks), settled instantly inside the central bank in fiat money (state-issued money declared by the sovereign to be legal tender) and blunted data monopolies (big tech firms have strong autonomy but weak fiduciary responsibilities over customer data). A new paper by the Bank for International Settlements (‘The design of digital financial infrastructure: lessons from India’) suggests that India demonstrates how “a central bank can be proactive and equal partners with private sector counterparts when it comes to fostering technological innovation in finance”.
UPI offers five policy lessons. First, how the India stack — interconnected yet independent platforms or open APIs — are a public good that lowers costs, spurs innovation, and blunts the natural digital winner-takes-all. Replicating this in education, healthcare, and government services are likely to be a harbinger of large scale multi-domain collaborative innovation. Second, collaboration can create ecosystems that overcome the birth defects of its constituents — the execution deficit of government, the trust deficit of private companies, and the scale deficit of nonprofits. Third, complementary policy interventions are important. Demonetisation and GST are changing the stories that firms and individuals tell themselves around cash and informality. Fourth, human capital and diversity matter. This revolution needed career bureaucrats to partner with academics, tech entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, global giants and private firms. The final lesson is that India doesn’t need to be Western or Chinese to be modern. If our policymakers had copied Alipay or US banks, we wouldn’t have leapfrogged their birth defects.
Google’s letter to the Federal Reserve counters powerful lobbying by US banks against the “FedNow” payment system that will undermine their supernormal profits. FedNow will do far less than UPI, but its launch delay supports the thesis of the new book, The Great Reversal, by Thomas Philippon that American capitalism, once a model for the world, is giving up on healthy competition. Many sectors are more concentrated than 20 years ago, dominated by fewer and bigger players who lobby politicians aggressively to protect and expand their profit margins. But capitalism without competition — India has seen that movie before — hurts growth, investments, productivity and wages.
There is more work to be done. The central government must deadline digitising all its payments. The RBI must implement the 100-plus action items arising from its own Vision 2021 document and the Nandan Nilekani Committee for Deepening Digital Payments. It must also make UPI and RuPay fit for use in our $70 billion inward remittances that currently come through exploitative financial institutions which don’t have clients but hostages. More importantly, the RBI must replicate the core design of UPI — fierce but sustainable private and public competition — in bank credit because our 50 per cent credit-to -GDP ratio is one of the reasons India is poor. China’s 300 per cent is the wrong number, but reaching the OECD average of 100 per cent needs the RBI to do many things — raising its human capital and technology game in regulation and supervision, catalysing an ecosystem for lending against the rapidly expanding digital exhaust of small firms and individuals, issuing more private bank licences, facilitating management changes in old private banks with market caps that signal questions about book value, and shepherding a governance and human capital revolution at PSU banks (their risk-weighted assets being lower than two years ago despite a capital injection of Rs 2.5 lakh crore should be unacceptable).
Converting the collective independence our citizens got in 1947 to individual freedom surely involved universal financial inclusion. The gap between this aspiration and reality was not a lie but a disappointment because our capital got handicapped without labour and our labour got handicapped without capital. Change has begun – the RBI, the finance ministry, and many individuals deserve our gratitude and duas for a billion digital payments a month. We now ask you for a billion digital payments a day.
India has crossed a billion monthly digital payments. Now, to a billion transactions a day
Digital loans: It’s a UPI moment for India’s credit market
India’s credit market could soon have its UPI moment. Just as UPI transformed the digital payments market, a new digital system that facilitates lending to small firms, based on their cash flows, is on its way. And it is tipped to see business worth an estimated Rs 20 lakh crore being transacted in the next six to seven years. That’s about a fifth of the total outstanding loans of banks at Rs 100 lakh crore.
The infrastructure would enable lenders of all hues — banks, NBFCs and fintechs — to disburse loans. They would be aided by the GST network, giving them reliable information on invoices filled by these MSMEs. The beauty of the system, experts say, lies in that any entity with access to a large number of MSME vendors can be loan service providers. It could be a PhonePe, an Amazon or even a SEWA; at the back-end, existing lenders like banks can do the lending. Also, the fact that loans are to be given on the basis of future cash flows — predicted from past data — rather than balance sheet data, would make it more efficient. “Lenders will price in a smaller risk premium so the cost of the loans will come down,” an expert said.
Lenders would find it easier to appraise customers since they can study invoices uploaded on the GSTN; this way they can get a good sense of the business history of the borrower. The borrower’s bank account will provide the credit history and an electronic system, bankers point out, would allow credit to be disbursed speedily.
Bankers say that while factoring as a product does exist, the volumes are insignificant since lenders don’t have access to reliable information on borrowers. With the transaction history now available on the GST network, that problem would be taken care of.
The UK Sinha committee on MSMEs had observed that small businesses lack access to formal credit. This is because banks find it hard to assess credit risk in the absence of financial information and data on historical cash flows. The committee pointed out that one of the reasons for information not being available is the absence of some kind of Unique Identification Number. Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman had said in her Budget speech that an app-based invoice financing would be launched. This would obviate the problem of delayed payments and “consequential cash flow mismatches for MSMEs”.
Experts say borrowers will be less inclined to default since the system will ensure speedy dissemination of his credit history; typically borrowers have been able to default to one lender but borrow from another. Since information on a borrower can be shared quickly between lenders — and an entity like Cibil can quickly put out default data quickly —- borrowers are likely to be more disciplined.
Digital loans: It’s a UPI moment for India’s credit market
India’s credit market could soon have its UPI moment. Just as UPI transformed the digital payments market, a new digital system that facilitates lending to small firms, based on their cash flows, is on its way. And it is tipped to see business worth an estimated Rs 20 lakh crore being transacted in the next six to seven years. That’s about a fifth of the total outstanding loans of banks at Rs 100 lakh crore.
The infrastructure would enable lenders of all hues — banks, NBFCs and fintechs — to disburse loans. They would be aided by the GST network, giving them reliable information on invoices filled by these MSMEs. The beauty of the system, experts say, lies in that any entity with access to a large number of MSME vendors can be loan service providers. It could be a PhonePe, an Amazon or even a SEWA; at the back-end, existing lenders like banks can do the lending. Also, the fact that loans are to be given on the basis of future cash flows — predicted from past data — rather than balance sheet data, would make it more efficient. “Lenders will price in a smaller risk premium so the cost of the loans will come down,” an expert said.
Lenders would find it easier to appraise customers since they can study invoices uploaded on the GSTN; this way they can get a good sense of the business history of the borrower. The borrower’s bank account will provide the credit history and an electronic system, bankers point out, would allow credit to be disbursed speedily.
Bankers say that while factoring as a product does exist, the volumes are insignificant since lenders don’t have access to reliable information on borrowers. With the transaction history now available on the GST network, that problem would be taken care of.
The UK Sinha committee on MSMEs had observed that small businesses lack access to formal credit. This is because banks find it hard to assess credit risk in the absence of financial information and data on historical cash flows. The committee pointed out that one of the reasons for information not being available is the absence of some kind of Unique Identification Number. Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman had said in her Budget speech that an app-based invoice financing would be launched. This would obviate the problem of delayed payments and “consequential cash flow mismatches for MSMEs”.
Experts say borrowers will be less inclined to default since the system will ensure speedy dissemination of his credit history; typically borrowers have been able to default to one lender but borrow from another. Since information on a borrower can be shared quickly between lenders — and an entity like Cibil can quickly put out default data quickly —- borrowers are likely to be more disciplined.
Digital loans: It’s a UPI moment for India’s credit market
UPI beats debit, credit cards to become India's most preferred payment mode
Unified Payments Interface (UPI) remained the most preferred mode of payment in terms of volume followed by debit cards, Immediate Payment Services (IMPS) and credit cards, said a new report on Thursday. UPI recorded a transaction volume of 10.8 billion in 2019, a year-over-year increase of 188 per cent, said the report from payments company Worldline India (WI).
"UPI is perhaps the fastest product to hit 1 billion transactions-a-month in 2019 since its inception in August 2016," said the "India Digital Payments Report 2019".
The findings of the report suggest that in India, digital payment products are being primarily utilised for person-to-person (P2P) transactions than person-to-merchants (P2M) transactions.
In terms of value, UPI facilitated transactions worth ₹18.36 trillion, up 214 per cent from 2018.
Nine banks were added in UPI ecosystem throughout the year, bringing the total number of banks providing UPI services to 143 as of December 2019.
Some of the key factors that powered UPI's transactions growth in 2019 are adoption of UPI 2.0 features by banks, enabling payments for IPO applications, facilitating Foreign Inward Remittance service, supporting donations for several relief programs, and numerous cashbacks and discounts offered by banks and non-bank players, said the report.
Immediate Payment Service (IMPS) recorded 55 per cent year-over-year increase by facilitating about 2.3 billion transactions in volume.
It clocked ₹21.8 trillion in terms of value, up 41 per cent from 2018.
In 2019, it on-boarded 165 banks under its ecosystem bringing the total number of banks providing IMPS services to the customers of 559 banks by end of 2019.
"In terms of value, IMPS attained the 'numero uno' position throughout the year followed by UPI. Value of debit and credit cards remained nearly the same throughout the year," said the report.
In 2019, UPI, debit cards, IMPS and credit cards together recorded a combined transactions volume of over 20 trillion and combined value of over ₹54 trillion, said the report.
The country has witnessed full range of Aadhaar enabled banking services through AePS over the past few years.
In 2019, the total volume of Aadhaar Enabled Payment System (AePS) transactions (ONUS, OFFUS, DEMO AUTH and eKYC) stood at 2.3 billion, achieving year-over-year growth of 12 per cent. The value of transactions achieved a milestone of ₹1 trillion in 2019 with year-over-year growth of 31 per cent, said the report.
For the research, Worldline analysed transactions available in public databases as well as transactions processed by the company in 2019.
Worldline India (WI) is wholly owned by Worldline SA, a leading payments company in Europe that is listed on Euronext Paris. Worldline entered India in 2010 with the acquisition of Venture Infotek followed by the acquisition of MRL Posnet in 2017.
UPI beats debit, credit cards to become India's most preferred payment mode
Unified Payments Interface (UPI) remained the most preferred mode of payment in terms of volume followed by debit cards, Immediate Payment Services (IMPS) and credit cards, said a new report on Thursday. UPI recorded a transaction volume of 10.8 billion in 2019, a year-over-year increase of 188 per cent, said the report from payments company Worldline India (WI).
"UPI is perhaps the fastest product to hit 1 billion transactions-a-month in 2019 since its inception in August 2016," said the "India Digital Payments Report 2019".
The findings of the report suggest that in India, digital payment products are being primarily utilised for person-to-person (P2P) transactions than person-to-merchants (P2M) transactions.
In terms of value, UPI facilitated transactions worth ₹18.36 trillion, up 214 per cent from 2018.
Nine banks were added in UPI ecosystem throughout the year, bringing the total number of banks providing UPI services to 143 as of December 2019.
Some of the key factors that powered UPI's transactions growth in 2019 are adoption of UPI 2.0 features by banks, enabling payments for IPO applications, facilitating Foreign Inward Remittance service, supporting donations for several relief programs, and numerous cashbacks and discounts offered by banks and non-bank players, said the report.
Immediate Payment Service (IMPS) recorded 55 per cent year-over-year increase by facilitating about 2.3 billion transactions in volume.
It clocked ₹21.8 trillion in terms of value, up 41 per cent from 2018.
In 2019, it on-boarded 165 banks under its ecosystem bringing the total number of banks providing IMPS services to the customers of 559 banks by end of 2019.
"In terms of value, IMPS attained the 'numero uno' position throughout the year followed by UPI. Value of debit and credit cards remained nearly the same throughout the year," said the report.
In 2019, UPI, debit cards, IMPS and credit cards together recorded a combined transactions volume of over 20 trillion and combined value of over ₹54 trillion, said the report.
The country has witnessed full range of Aadhaar enabled banking services through AePS over the past few years.
In 2019, the total volume of Aadhaar Enabled Payment System (AePS) transactions (ONUS, OFFUS, DEMO AUTH and eKYC) stood at 2.3 billion, achieving year-over-year growth of 12 per cent. The value of transactions achieved a milestone of ₹1 trillion in 2019 with year-over-year growth of 31 per cent, said the report.
For the research, Worldline analysed transactions available in public databases as well as transactions processed by the company in 2019.
Worldline India (WI) is wholly owned by Worldline SA, a leading payments company in Europe that is listed on Euronext Paris. Worldline entered India in 2010 with the acquisition of Venture Infotek followed by the acquisition of MRL Posnet in 2017.
UPI beats debit, credit cards to become India's most preferred payment mode
RuPay is a popular mode of digital payment that has not only gained acceptance in India but also Internationally. RuPay card can be used at ATMs, POS devices and e-commerce websites across India allowing the users to use it anytime and anywhere. #DigitalIndia
Jab bank 50000 ka cap lagayega to yeh digital payments flop ho jayegi
still there is a time, take out your money from banks
We are responsible for our own greed as we are responsible for bad investment.Jab bank 50000 ka cap lagayega to yeh digital payments flop ho jayegi
still there is a time, take out your money from banks
as if Enforcement Directorate didn't know when it was happening. Those babus were pro congressis.