Pandemic helped India’s digitisation march:NPCI COO

India’s march towards digitisation of its payment landscape was fast-tracked during the Coronavirus pandemic, said Praveena Rai, Chief Operating Officer (COO), National Payments Corporation of India’s (NPCI). NPCI is an initiative of Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and Indian Banks’ Association (IBA) under the provisions of the Payment and Settlement Systems Act, 2007.The COO of NPCI was speaking at a seminar organised by Xavier School of Management.

The COO of the umbrella body for retail payment and settlements in India said that in the run up for digitisation of India has also increased due to the regulatory framework and policies of the government and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), PTI has reported. She added that digitisation has cut across all sections of the society.

“Digitisation has revolutionised every single aspect of life and onboarding has risen substantially. There has been gradual migration from cash to digital payments both offline and online”, Rai said.

She  further added that there has been a rise in digital engagements by giving reward programmes to customers. According to her, digitisation is also driving a habit of savings among the customers which is also leading to financial inclusion in the country. The NPCI COO said that now people, consumers and merchants are preferring to go digital, adding that there also has been a big growth in UPI driven by acceptance of QR.

In the wake of the pandemic, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) had earlier this year asked customers to switch to digital modes of banking and payment. RBI had said that non-cash digital payment options such as NEFT, IMPS, UPI and BBPS are available round the clock to facilitate fund transfers, purchase of goods / services, payment of bills, etc. The move was to limit the control of the pandemic and avoid physical contact with each other.

The growth trajectory for India’s digital economy is bound to grow from here on. Global Investment bank Bernstein, earlier this year, said that India’s mobile and credit card payment is likely to grow at 63% and 25% Compound annual growth rate by March of 2025. This would translate into 11 times growth for the UPI ecosystem. India recorded 1.3 billion UPI transactions in June of 2020, which stands testament to India’s rapidly growing digital payments space. 

In the July-September quarter, the number of transactions by way of mobile wallets was 72.79 crore and the value was Rs 39,105 crore, a data sourced by Worldline India shows. 577 crore Mobile Apps based transactions were recorded while net banking / internet browser based transactions were over 81.47 crore.

Worldline India said that in September 2020, UPI clocked over 180 crore transactions in volume and breached Rs 3 lakh crore in terms of value.