Will India's top-down approach to financial innovation results in a national success like the Japanese ecosystem built upon Sony's ubiquitous FeliCa chips, or will we see implementation issues and corruption stifle progress?
India has set out its plans for a unified electronic payments system and set of APIs designed to wean the country off of cash and onto electronic transactions tapping smartphone and biometric technology. Set up at the behest of the RBI in 2008, the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) has been given the task of consolidating and integrating the country's various retail payments systems. The group has now published its unified payment interface API and technology specifications, which it says can be used by banks, merchants and other institutional players to send and receive payments.
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