India's RuPay cards may soon break a three-decade old monopoly of Visa and Mastercard

NEW DELHI: India’s indigenous RuPay cards will pip one of the two top international card giants, Visa and Mastercard, on the value and volume of transactions done through them in the country this calendar year, a top official has said.Also, some 30 countries have approached India for the technology of ‘BHIM UPI’ platform for digital payments launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi about 16 months ago, Dilip Asbe, chief executive at National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), told the country’s top bureaucrats at a meeting last week.“We (RuPay cards) are already the number 1 scheme in the number of cards issued. This year, we will become number 2 scheme on value and volume done on PoS machines and ecommerce,” Asbe told bureaucrats at a closed-door session on Civil Services Day on April 20. “So we will not be number 3 anymore behind Visa and Mastercard. We will pip one of them to become number 2. I don’t see a reason why we should not be Number 1 in couple of years, in both value and volume,” he said. ETaccessed deliberations of the session which have been made public now.Visa and Mastercard have dominated the debit and credit card industry in India for three decades. NPCI launched RuPay cards about six years back.“Before RuPay cards came, debit cards were being issued by only 35 banks,” Asbe told bureaucrats. “Now, about 1,000 banks are issuing debit cards, so that people can go back and use them for digital transactions.”The government is constantly working to increase its popularity. Ajay Prakash Sawhney, secretary at ministry of electronics and information technology, told bureaucrats at the same session that all government websites must enable online payments through RuPay cards. “Sometimes we see that websites take you to option of paying through Visa and Mastercard cards, but the Ru-Pay card option is not there. We have to ensure our instruments are enabled on websites,” Sawhney said.Prime Minister Narendra Modi at Delhi Economics Conclave in 2015 had spoken about emergence of RuPay cards as an alternative to the otherwise duopolistic industry dominated by Visa and Mastercard. “Thanks to RuPay cards, we introduced healthy competition in the debit and credit card space traditionally dominated by a few international players,” Modi had said.His government prescribed the issuance of RuPay cards to each of the account holders who have opened the accounts under the Prime Minister Jan Dhan Yojana launched in 2014.At the April 20 session, Asbe also said at least 30 countries have approached NPCI asking “if you can give us IP” of the BHIM UPI platform launched by the prime minister on December 30, 2016. “All our life we have been following the west. This (BHIM UPI) is the only platform along with Aadhaar where the west is trying to follow the east,” he said. “There is huge international demand for India’s UPI platform among the large players. Of course, first we have to serve our country and only then can we expand it internationally. Right now, our priority is to take this platform to 400-500 million Indians in the next couple of years,” Asbe said.

from The Economic Times https://ift.tt/2jeKeBi