Digital India: Disruptions

The financial ecosystem in India is undergoing a transformation. Trends that are taking root cause in financial services and emerging business models, are bringing a larger number of people under the financial inclusion umbrella. These are changing financial services delivery, and a new financial system is emerging.

For building an eco-system of electronic payments by reducing paper based instruments, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) vision 2018 to develop Payments and Settlement Systems in India focuses on “coverage”, “convenience”, “confidence”, “convergence”, and “cost”. To this end, strategic initiatives to be undertaken by participants in the payments industry include:

• Responsive Regulation: A Regulatory framework that allows for enhanced coverage, interoperability in payments, along with convenience and security for end users.
• Robust Infrastructure: There is an urgent need to simplify and accelerate payments penetration in India. Lack of sufficient IT infrastructure and end to end digitization is leading to challenges in driving digital payments. For greater proliferation of digital payments, the entire supply chain must be digitized.
• Effective Supervision: Testing the resilience of the payments and settlements infrastructure including Financial Market Infrastructures (FMIs) and System Wide Important Payment Systems (SWIPS) in the country.
• Customer Centricity: Payment options that offer customers & merchant’s convenience, build trust, are frictionless, put in place adequate customer redressal mechanisms, and create awareness and education among customers, will give the customer holistic control over their payments experience.

These initiatives are expected to result in a decreased use of paper based instruments, increased users of mobile banking, growth in acceptance infrastructure, increased use of Aadhaar based payments, as well as growth in other modes of electronic payments.