RBI had announced the launch of India Card under its plan for improving the payments system in India during 2009-12. RBI has finally given its nod to name the payment card as Rupay and finalised the logo as well. Rupay will be directly competing against international payment processing companies like Visa and Mastercard.
The name was actually changed to Rupay in December 2010 to avoid any legal roadblock as 2 other companies had already applied for similar names. Good that they did not fall into all those complication else they would only keep TRAIing (trying – pun intended) to get the roll out on time. Though shouldn’t they have checked that long before they proposed India Card as the name?
Indian Banks’ Association had floated the idea of having India’s very own payment processing system. Currently 10 banks including 6 public, 2 Private and 2 Foreign sector banks are share holder in the Rupay project with National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) being the actual owner of the product.
As per the latest RBI data, debit card transactions rose 49 percent(YoY) to Rs 3.7K crore in January 2011. The number of debit cards currently in use in India is about 21.82 crore. Against this, credit card transactions rose 28 percent in January to Rs 6.9K crore, despite a 10 percent drop in the number of credit cards in circulation. As of January 31, 2011, there were 1.81 crore active credit cards in the India.
Domestic banks paid around Rs.450Cr as payment processing charges for processing domestic payments to the likes of Visa and Mastercard last year.
Also on the cards is India Moneyline (name change will be required again), a 24hrs real time NEFT system which will replace the current 9am-5PM batch processing system for P2P electronic fund transfer.
How do you think Rupay will help Indian Ecommerce? Can we expect a fall of TDR for payment gateway to 0.2% from the current minimum of about 1.6%?
[Naman is a startup enthusiast and has worked with couple of Indian startups as Product Manager. He is the founder of FindYogi]
