By the end of December 2021, India had 389 million users who did not have access to mobile Internet, while there were 765.8 million mobile Internet users in the country.
Debit card payments remained sluggish due to the surge in digital transactions after the pandemic, and the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) has emerged as the most popular mode of money transfer, particularly for small value transactions, according to RBI data. In July 2020, the total debit card spends stood at Rs 2.81 trillion, as compared to Rs 3.15 trillion in July 2023, reflecting a growth of 11.96 per cent. UPI spends have seen a whopping growth of 428 per cent, zooming from Rs 2.90 trillion to Rs 15.33 trillion during the same period, the data revealed.
In the past, there have been instances of people getting fake e-mails in the name of RBI.
Nandan Nilekani complimented RBI on granting licenses to payments banks, calling it 'a great revolution'.
Friday will be a landmark day for domestic markets, with all the listed stocks entering the professed T+1 (trading plus one day) settlement cycle. About 200 stocks, which account for more than 80 per cent of India's market capitalisation, will be settled on a next-day basis, with effect from January 27. This will evidently complete the transition to the T+1 cycle that started in February 2022 with the bottom 500 stocks in terms of market value.
The Reserve Bank of India's (RBI's) recent decision to allow credit cards for payments through the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) is likely to attract a merchant discount rate (MDR), said a top payment industry source. For smaller merchants, a subsidy for MDR could be provided. "With credit card-UPI linkage, UPI will not only be a payment instrument but also a lending platform. "How can banks lend without a commercial model? Also, the government has said MDR will be zero for payment products but not for lending products," the source said, indicating the MDR regime for credit card-linked UPI payments.
This will be done across five cities - Delhi, Bengaluru, Coimbatore, Bhopal, and Shillong. Thereafter, it will be scaled up and launched in 100 cities over a period of six months, said a senior government official.
Technology giant Apple has informed its customers in India that it will no longer store their card information on file and will not be accepting payments made by debit cards and credit cards for purchases or subscriptions on the App store or other Apple services. The decision has been taken by the US-based company in view of the Reserve Bank of India's (RBI's) card data storage guidelines, which will kick in from July 1. The deadline for implementing these norms was extended twice.
In this month itself, UPI can hit 2 billion transactions and by March 2021, it should reach 2.15 billion transactions in a month.
A merchant using the bank's merchant App, QR code, PoS or Payment gateways, across all segments, including electronics, apparel, grocery, stand to win assured cashback and prizes on volume build-up, EMI or digital transactions.
The app uses a traveller's mobile GPS to predict a train's delay.
The RBI has created a stunted business model by which payment banks are supposed to shoulder the noble objective of financial inclusion without being able to make much money.
Cryptocurrency exchanges face issues with their current bank accounts.
The transition to UPI-based ATMs will be gradual, and consumers will not immediately switch to using standalone UPI ATMs overnight.
Taxi booking, shopping and transfer of money will be easy.
India will grow at around 7.4 per cent in 2022-23 and continue at the same pace in the next year as well, Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said on Friday. Sitharaman said there are risks on the external front and this is not the right time to throw caution to the wind, and also assured exporters of all the necessary support from the government as they face the headwinds. Speaking at the FE Best Bank Awards event here, Sitharaman said global agencies like IMF and the World Bank have taken cognisance of the strengths of the Indian economy by saying that it will be among the fastest growing ones in the next two years.
India saw growth of around 213 per cent in the number of real-time payments processed over the past year.
Install a security software that has an app advisor function, advises Tinesh Bhasin.
'The new Bill introduces no policy or rate changes, leaving financial planning strategies largely unaffected.'
'The considerations for choosing between the old and new tax regimes remain essentially unchanged.'
They straddle many different (non-financial) lines of business with sometimes opaque overarching governance structures.
The finance ministry (FinMin) has asked Infosys to work on ways to extract and access taxpayers' real-time data faster and accurately as it is crucial for taking decisions on policy changes. While reviewing progress of the income tax portal 2.0, which had faced glitches, the officials also told the Infosys team to increase the scope of pre-filled data in the ITR forms. Senior officials in the ministry held a review meeting last month with the Infosys team and officials of the Central Processing Centre (CPC).
Going by the RBI directive and the overall narrative, Paytm may have lost the rigour of stress tests, audits and compliance.
Get a new QR code from an alternative provider. PhonePe, Google Pay, Pine Labs, etc are some of the other service providers.
RuPay National Common Mobility Card's offline wallet can be used to make ticket payments in transit, including in metros, cabs, etc, enabling automatic, quick, cashless payments.
Unified Payments Interface (UPI), the flagship payments platform of the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), made a record in volume and value of transactions in July as digital payments rise in the pandemic. UPI processed a record 3.24 billion transactions in July up 15.7 per cent from June when it processed 2.8 billion transactions. In value terms, in July, the platform processed transactions worth Rs 6.06 trillion, up 10.76 per cent from June.
The US Trade Representative noted that India's average applied tariff rate stood at 17% per cent, the highest of any major world economy.
As on June 16, currency in circulation was Rs 15.29 lakh cr, or 86.2% of pre-note ban level
Modi was honoured with the 'Order of Zayed', the UAE's highest civilian award, in 2019 as a mark of appreciation for his efforts to boost bilateral ties between the two nations.
Financial institutions are 300 times more vulnerable to cyberattacks than any other industry.
The Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) has proposed measures mandating daily upstreaming of all investor funds from stockbrokers to clearing corporations (CCs). The step, aimed at reducing risk on client funds, will further deplete brokers' revenues as they will lose interest income with transfers being done daily. At present, stockbrokers convert the surplus funds into bank guarantees (BG) or fixed deposit (FD) receipts which earns them extra income.
While it took UPI three years to reach a billion transactions in a month, the next billion came in just a year. Digital payments, especially UPI, saw increased adoption in 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
The digital transformation should not be confined to a small part of the "human race" and its greater benefits will be realised only when digital access becomes "truly inclusive", Prime Minister Narendra Modi said at the G-20 summit on Wednesday. Modi also strongly pitched for a pledge by the G-20 leaders to work for bringing digital transformation into the life of every human being in the next 10 years so that no person is deprived of the benefits of the new technologies. In a session on digital transformation, the prime minister also said that principle of "data for development" will be an integral part of the overall theme of India's upcoming G-20 Presidency.
These top two apps account for more than 78 per cent of the UPI market in terms of volume of transaction, and 86 per cent of the market by value of transactions in December.
N Sundaresha Subramanian digs deeper into what Catalyst, an Indo-US project, brings to the payments ecosystem.
The country has come a long way in the process of financial inclusion, Raghuram Rajan said, but "still has a way to go".
Electronic transactions are rising fast, so are cases of payment failure and delayed settlement. One needs to be proactive.
An analysis for the first eight months of CY18 shows that the value of RuPay and UPI transactions constitute 65.2 per cent of all transactions done through debit and credit cards, in value terms, across retail outlets by the end of August.
WhatsApp on Wednesday said it expects to facilitate the purchase of "affordable sachet-sized" health insurance through its platform by the end of the year as part of its efforts to provide users in India with greater access to financial solutions. The Facebook-owned company noted that its 'Payments' feature is now available to users across the country (currently up to 20 million users) with support from banking partners - State Bank of India, HDFC, ICICI and Axis Bank.
'The market has picked up for commercial vehicles. We are very close to pre-pandemic levels.'
As it readies for its initial public offering (IPO) later this year, digital payments firm Paytm is honing its strengths to remodel itself from being a payment wallet to becoming a financial services provider, and is working towards narrowing its losses, evident from its most recent Annual Report. Unlike many of its peers, Paytm has started expanding its merchant payment ecosystem. It has realised that though it can take the maximum share of the Unified Payment Interface (UPI) transactions, from a revenue generation point of view it will not have any impact.
