Move will have wide-ranging implications across India’s financial and fintech system, affecting everyone from established lenders to payments startups.
Analysts expect the biggest winners to be homegrown. RuPay, a card system run by the National Payments Corporation of India, will be a natural choice for banks looking for a new debit card provider less likely to attract the ire of the RBI — the central bank itself established the NPCI with a consortium of Indian lenders. It will also help accelerate the shift towards mobile money, which has been an Indian government priority. The NPCI’s Unified Payments Interface mobile money network allows cheap, instant transfers across bank accounts without cards. The volume of UPI transactions grew to 2.8bn in June, up from 1.3bn a year earlier.