Digital payment firms happy with Centre’s push

Mumbai: The digital push by government through incentives and demonetisation has come as a booster to the financial technology companies or digital payment companies and they are expected to pass on the benefits to the consumers.

Naveen Surya, chairman, Payment Council of India and managing director, ItzCash told this newspaper that this move will bring in more and more participation from under and unbanked population.

“More such incentive announcements should be implemented in other payments such as electricity or mobile bills, long distance railway tickets, etc,” he said. Currently, only about 10 per cent of all retail payments is digital and mainly through – debit credit/ prepaid cards, net banking etc. So the opportunity is to move the remaining  90 per cent of the business, approximately Rs 135,00,000 crore ($2 trillion) towards digital platforms, which is very huge.

Incentives, said Mr Surya, can be on both sides of the transaction, savings/benefits to consumers and tax breaks for merchants to accept payments digitally. The increased amount of liquidity and transparency in the system due to all digital will itself pay for these incentives scheme he said, besides establishing an apt behavioural shift.  

ItzCash, he said is clocking approximately 6,00,000 transactions daily and have witnessed an upsurge especially in their  Prepaid Cards and a 40 per cent jump in business volumes, primarily from underserved Bharat (rural India).

He said that is “where we see the real growth to happen in digital payment industry. Since most of them will be first time users ItzCash has what it calls a PHYGITAL approach — digital cash with physical confidence as it has different solutions for different segments.