Tag: india mobile payments

The country’s effort to go cashless has led to an unprecedented growth in smartphone digital payments.

A new study predicted that the Indian mobile wallet market will experience a growth rate of more than 190 percent by fiscal year 2022. The forecast was made as a result of research conducted by Assocham, a trade organization, and RNCOS, a business consulting firm.

The prediction was that mobile payment transactions are likely to reach a CAGR of over 160 percent per year.

That rate will continue to increase from the current fiscal year through to 2022. At that time, the mobile wallet market will be worth 250 billion, said the prediction. That is a substantial increase over the current size of the market which is estimated to be just over half a billion.

The report on the forecast suggested that there are several reasons that the use of mobile payments in India is growing exceptionally quickly. To start, e-commerce as a whole is on the rise. This is a trend occuring worldwide. Moreover, mobile internet penetration is also growing rapidly, meaning that more consumers have access to these options than ever before.

That said, the mobile wallet market is rising faster in India than in most other areas of the world.

With rising smartphone penetration, the Indian environment is also aligning well for mobile wallet use in a way that is not being experienced in other areas of the globe. For one thing, there is an increase in disposable incomes. More people have money to spend on areas outside of vital essentials.

With all these factors combined with the country’s efforts to reduce the use of cash, people are turning to their phones to pay for products and services. This is, after all, a country that is greatly unbanked and in which it is not necessarily commonplace to have credit cards. Therefore, when cash is not an option, people are turning to the option they already have in their hands: mobile phones.

This has created a nearly ideal opportunity for mobile wallet market growth and it appears as though this will continue for at least another five years.

The Unified Payments Interface is meant to simplify transactions over smartphones in the country.

The national payments system launched in India this week. The Unified Payments Interface (UPI) is designed to let shoppers complete transactions using mobile phones. So far, the launch includes 21 particpating banks. Customers of those banks can already use the mobile payments services.

Among the banks include ICICI, Axis Bank, Yes Bank as well as eighteen others in India.

With UPI, customers can use the national mobile payments system to both send and receive money. All they need is a smartphone and an account with a participating bank. This system functions by assigning a “virtual identifier” to a user, instead of a person’s actual identity. The purpose is heightened mobile security. There are a number of different functions available by way of the platform. The functions include: bill payments, barcode based in-store purchase transactions, real-time peer to peer (P2P) transactions, delivery payments as well as several others.

The national mobile payments system was initially announced in April and has since been pilot tested.

The pilot initially consisted of bank employees. Now that the pilot is complete, availability has broadened substantially. Any Indian bank with more than 1,000 pilot customers and a success rate of 80 percent with 5,000 or more transactions can use the UPI mobile apps. They can offer their branded version of UPI mobile payments applications by way of the Google Play store. That way, it can be accessed by the general public in India.

By using those requirements for launching the mobile apps in the Google Play store, the goal was to incentivize participation in the pilot. That way, there would be a greater capability for improving the application before the nationwide launch. It is possible for existing mobile users to integrate their platforms into the Unified Payments Interface.

Some have predicted that this national mobile payments platform will be very helpful in boosting e-payment adoption in India. That opportunity has the potential to move the country forward in its progress toward financial inclusion. This is important as only just over half of Indians (53 percent) currently have bank accounts.