Fino Payments Bank asserts its compliance with GST regulations following the arrest of its MD and CEO, Rishi Gupta, by the Directorate General of GST Intelligence (DGGI). The bank clarifies that the investigation pertains to program managers associated with multiple banks and not the bank's own GST compliance.
This would imply a 29 per cent year-on-year rise, significantly lower than growth rates seen in recent years.
Several executives argue that UPI has the potential to grow tenfold, but warn that the absence of a monetisation model risks stagnating the real-time payments system, which has been recording all-time-high transaction volumes every year.
Investors will be able to authenticate if the entity receiving the payment is a valid entity under the ambit of Sebi.
'The introduction of a reasonable MDR for large merchant transactions will allow the industry to continue investing in innovation, cybersecurity, grievance redressal, and merchant support, ultimately ensuring that UPI continues to thrive.'
'The only solution is for the government to allow us to charge a low controlled MDR of 25 bps on UPI P2M transactions only for merchants with more than a Rs 40 lakh turnover.'
Mint Road, on December 21, 2023, flagged the role of self-regulatory organisations (SROs) in strengthening the compliance culture in regulated entities (REs) and providing a consultative platform for policymaking. It also decided to issue an omnibus framework for SROs.
'The transition from payment banks to SFBs is only permissible for banks not owned by corporate entities.'
Why are financial-technology (fintech) players moving back to India, or doing the reverse-flipping?
The NPCI has permitted non-residents from 10 countries, including the US, Canada and UAE, to digitally transfer funds using the UPI platform from NRE/NRO accounts. The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) in a circular said it has been receiving requests for allowing non-residents to use international mobile numbers for transacting in Unified Payments Interface (UPI). Accordingly, the NPCI in a circular dated January 10 has asked the UPI participants to put in place a mechanism by April 30 under which non-residents having NRE/NRO accounts will be allowed to transfer funds using their international mobile numbers.
'The focus needs to shift towards the ability to collect payments, particularly in tier-3 to tier-4 areas where acceptance is still lacking.'
Recently, Slice, a payment app, acquired a 5 per cent stake in North East Small Finance (NESF) for $3.42 million - the first such deal by a fintech in a small finance bank. Slice (valued at $1.5 billion, and backed by Tiger Global, Blume Ventures and Axis Bank) will technically get a toehold in a scheduled commercial bank if NESF were to get a licence to morph into one down the line Such a transition is well within the banking regulator's declared framework. The transaction has to be seen in a larger context.
The recent Reserve Bank of India (RBI) norms on tokenisation services, which will be offered by card networks, are likely to result in merchants and payment aggregators incurring a cost as they have to pay a fee to the networks. The merchants and the payment aggregators, in turn, may pass on the cost to the customers. The norms, which were issued by the banking regulator released on September 7, allow card networks like Visa and Mastercard to offer the tokenisation service.
More than three weeks have passed since the Reserve Bank of India's (RBI's) new guidelines on e-mandates for recurring payments came into effect but consumers are still taking to social media platforms to complain about the disruptions they are facing. This comes as most stakeholders in the ecosystem have not put in place systems in accordance with the new rules, resulting in many transactions not going through. Industry sources said most banks are still not ready, especially the smaller ones.
The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) on Friday extended the card-on-file (CoF) tokenisation deadline by three months to September 30, 2022, in view of various representations received from industry bodies. Card-on-file, or CoF, refers to card information stored by payment gateway and merchants to process future transactions. Tokenisation is the process of replacing actual card details with a unique alternate code called 'Token' - thereby enabling more secure transactions.
Come October 1, merchants, payment aggregators and acquiring banks can no longer store the card details of customers.
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.
Tokenisation is the process of replacing debit and credit card numbers with a set of characters or tokens.
The payments industry is at a crossroads with the banking regulator on two pressing issues, neither of which seems headed towards an amicable solution. Depending upon which side accommodates the other, customers in India will have to choose between convenience and ironclad safety. In the end, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), which regulates both banks and all payments services providers, will prevail. But the question is: will it do so by bending a little or by sticking to its firm stand? The two issues - one concerning payment facilitators storing customers' card details and the other about auto-renewal of payments - appear similar but aren't.
Many of India's fintech entities and banks have stored all their customer data in India; however, many do use foreign servers, for operations, providing services and for data analytics.
While Google has market capitalisation of almost $753 billion and Facebook commands one of $515 billion, it is the wealth of user data they have that one fears
Customers have other options available to them to do low-value transactions, if wallets start mandating full KYC and would switch to those.
The start of BHIM's declining share coincided with the launch of Google Tez in mid-Septem
E-KYCs and Aadhaar authentication are of crucial importance to the fin-tech companies as the recent RBI instructions require strict KYCs for these players to function in the market.
Experts say the new guideline is likely to hurt foreign players more, especially card companies such as Visa, MasterCard and American Express who process and store credit card transaction data outside of India.
While the acceptance of cards, mobile wallets and banking apps is increasing, only 10 per cent of transactions take place through them.
Unified Payments Interface launched to simplify mobile banking.
While most banks in India store all this data on Indian servers in their core banking systems, the current directive addresses new-age payment and fintech companies operating in the space
Some initial reactions to Prime Minister Narendra Modi's announcement of demonetisation of Rs 1,000 and Rs 500 notes with effect from midnight.
From small retailers' experiences with e-wallets to digital transaction numbers post demonetisation, Geetanjali Krishna and Karan Choudhury find out where the truth lies.
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