A day after getting permission to raise its Unified Payments Interface (UPI) user base to 100 million, WhatsApp on Thursday said it has plans to make significant investments in 'payments on WhatsApp' across India, including India-first features and driving adoption. The company, however, did not share details of its plans. The Meta-owned messaging app got its first greenlight for its payments service from the National Payments Council of India (NPCI) in November 2020 with a cap of 20 million users. A year later, in November 2021, the limit was raised to 40 million users.
The Budget announcement of taxing 'virtual digital assets' or crypto currencies will help the income-tax department measure the "depth" of this trade in the country, know the investors and the nature of their investments and it does not "attach any legality" to these transactions, Central Board of Direct Taxes chairman J B Mohapatra said.
Seeking to rope in youngsters to promote cashless transactions, Modi said for every person you introduce to the BHIM app, you will get a cash back of Rs 10.
Now, 83 per cent males and 77 per cent females have formal bank accounts but they are hardly using them
The 0.5 per cent Krishi Kalyan Cess (KKC) on all services increases the total tax chargeable on services to 15 per cent, making it expensive to dine out or travel.
Most public sector banks, flush with deposits now, offer 3-4% interest on savings deposits, while a few private sector banks go up to 6%.
The income-tax department has detected "unaccounted" transactions and investments worth more than Rs 100 crore after it raided two Jharkhand Congress MLAs, their alleged associates and linked coal and iron ore businesses across the state last week.
Feature phones still hold the majority of the 270 million handsets market in the country/
From small retailers' experiences with e-wallets to digital transaction numbers post demonetisation, Geetanjali Krishna and Karan Choudhury find out where the truth lies.
HUL believes that post Covid, the awareness about health and wellbeing and selfcare, has exploded and there is a mindset change from health as absence of disease, to health as a part of lifestyle.
Walmart, the world's largest retailer, has paid $1.4 billion to buy out US-based Tiger Global's investment in e-commerce firm Flipkart, according to sources. The transaction puts Flipkart's valuation at $35 billion, against nearly $38 billion in 2021 when it raised funds from Japan's SoftBank, Walmart, and other investors. Tiger Global, Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal, and Accel now have all fully exited the e-commerce firm by selling their stake to Walmart.
She said that despite government scheme and initiatives ranging from roads to agriculture, housing, scholarships to electricity benefiting lives of people, a false narrative was being created by the opposition that the government was working for cronies.
The Rs 2,000 note withdrawal decision and response to it so far suggest that the move can help boost FY24 GDP growth to beyond 6.5 per cent estimated by the RBI, a report said on Monday. The real GDP growth for the first quarter of FY24 will come at 8.1 per cent with an upward bias and the Reserve Bank of India's 6.5 per cent estimate can also be exceeded, economists at the country's largest lender SBI said. "We expect Q1 FY24 GDP growth at 8.1 per cent with an upward bias due to the impact of Rs 2000 note withdrawal event...this reinforces our projection that FY24 GDP could be higher than 6.5 per cent, basis the RBI estimate," a note said.
Industry estimates over 30 tonnes of gold were sold on Akshaya Tritiya this time.
'To the believers of crypto regulations, I have only one question to ask, how will you regulate it?'
...current industry models will soon fade out, notes Ajit Balakrishnan.
The probe, being conducted under various sections of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, is against the Kallal Group and the UK-based Lyca group and its Indian companies Lyca Productions and Lyca Hotels, it said.
In January, Visa's chief executive officer, Al Kelly, said during an earnings call that "there's been a burst of the balloon in valuations in the fintech world". Noting that the trend of lower valuations "is a helpful characteristic of the current environment", he added: "We will look for capabilities and management teams that will bring more value to Visa than we can bring ourselves." Data from KPMG's Pulse of Fintech H2'22 shows that global fintech investment - via mergers and acquisitions (M&As), private equity (PE) and venture capital (VC) firms - at $164.1 billion in 2022, was down 31 per cent over the year before. Indian fintechs held up better during this timeframe, attracting $6 billion, or a fall of 24 per cent.
With the arrival of new players such as Amazon Pay, Google Tez and Flipkart's PhonePe, digital money companies are now changing their business pitch.
Reports from Ludhiana, Coimbatore, Moradabad, Tirupur, Indore, Surat, Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai and Hyderabad, suggest the impact of demonetisation is worsening.
Opposition members in the Lok Sabha on Monday blamed the Bharatiya Janata Party-led central government's policies for the price rise and accused it of ignoring the plight of common people, saying kitchens will soon "see a lockdown" if the Centre does not take corrective measures.
In a stock exchange filing, Adani Enterprises Ltd said VCPL has urged SEBI "to provide its observations on the draft letter of offer filed in relation to the open offer, in accordance with the SEBI (SAST) Regulations."
He said the country needs to have "zero tolerance" for corruption in the administrative ecosystem and this would work for the idea of a developed India.
This year, festive sales are expected to push up the annual gross merchandise value of e-commerce companies to around $38 billion, a 40 per cent growth over the previous year.
Digital assistants are a gateway to powerful artificial intelligence tools
Nivedita Mookerji finds out how Paytm CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma is handling his soaring popularity after the note ban as well as the criticism that comes as a package deal.
While the RBI's guidelines aim to streamline the loan closure process, borrowers must remain proactive.
The old note will continue to be accepted for other utility bill payments as well as at railway ticketing counters and counters of government or public sector undertaking buses for purchase of bus tickets till December 15
Prime Minister Narendra Modi will on Friday launch two schemes of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) that may go a long way in changing how the household sector invests, and complains if anything goes wrong with their savings. These schemes - retail direct and an integrated ombudsman - will be launched by the Prime Minister virtually, in the presence of Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman. With the introduction of retail direct, a common man can directly take a position in government securities (G-Sec), considered to be the safest asset class a sovereign can offer.
Billionaire Gautam Adani on Wednesday shared a personal note on the development of Dharavi in Mumbai, days after the Maharashtra government issued a resolution to award the Dharavi redevelopment project to his conglomerate on July 14. In the note shared with the media, Adani said his first tryst with Dharavi in Mumbai was in the late 1970s, and the slum settlement continues to amaze and inspire the billionaire to date. "When this opportunity to renew Dharavi came calling, I seized it with both hands," he said.
The growth in personal loans for fintech major Paytm may remain muted in the future and not replicate a three-digit year-on-year (Y-o-Y) growth that it recorded in the previous years, a person familiar with the matter said. Sources said the personal loans book may grow in the range of 30 to 40 per cent Y-o-Y on its current base. On a quarter-on-quarter (Q-o-Q) basis, the number of personal loans the Noida-based fintech company disbursed has dropped 20 per cent from 0.3 million in the first quarter of this financial year (Q1FY24) to 0.24 million in Q2FY24, according to regulatory filings.
The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) is looking to collaborate with foreign countries and international organisations to build digital identity systems across the world, a top official said on Friday. UIDAI CEO Saurabh Garg during a panel discussion with Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma at the Infinity Forum said the authority is also exploring emerging technology to enhance security and increase the number of transactions that can be done by using Aadhaar. "We think going forward we will be happy to collaborate with other nations...We would like to collaborate with international organisations also in building international institutions for standards for national identity.
We are certainly for digitisation. I do not have opinion about demonetisation. I still don't, says Bill Gates.
About 300 fintech firms are under investigation by the ED for allegedly partnering 38 non-banking financial companies for predatory lending practices to charge borrowers high interest rates.
Could it have been more reformist? Of course, but this is an election year Budget, observes Akash Prakash.
'AI is not a new thing for us. We started our AI journey in 2015.'
India appears poised to sustain its growth in a more durable way than before with the economy carrying the momentum from FY23 into the current fiscal year, the Annual Economic Review for 2022-23 released by the finance ministry on Thursday said. However, the report cautioned that escalation of geopolitical stress, enhanced volatility in global financial systems, sharp price correction in global stock markets, a high magnitude of El-Nino impact, and modest trade activity and FDI inflows, are factors that could constrain the pace of growth. "Should these developments deepen and dampen growth in the subsequent quarters, the external sector may challenge India's growth outlook for FY24," the finance ministry said.
Despite strong AUM growth, MFs lag behind other popular investment avenues. MFs received only 6 per cent of total household savings in 2021-2022.
He said Parliament in the past decades has debated a number of government decisions, which had caused tensions and social conflict, but it was now deadlocked by rival parties over a 'constructive decision' like demonetisation.
While mobile wallets are still busy exploring the multiple facets of interoperability, experts believe that bringing in new customers would be costly affair and the numbers of new wallet users might not see a major hike anytime soon.
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