Anyone who has visited or lived in India will tell you that cash is the most favoured method of payments for Indians. In 2016, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), India’s Central Bank released a concept paper titled ‘ Card Acceptance Infrastructure ’. Merchants discourage cards use
The paper noted that whilst there has been a significant increase in electronic transactions in India, the growth has not occurred uniformly in all segments. In fact card usage in India is invisible in many areas. Many merchants actively discourage customers from paying with a card, particularly for smaller transactions and may even charge 1-2% extra for payment processing. Number of debit cards grows exponentially
At present, there has been a growth of card usage but mainly at ATMs. Usage of debit cards, for example, grew by 64 per cent between October of 2013 and 2015, while credit card usage rose by 23 per cent in the same time frame. By the end of December of 2015, there were 22.74 million credit cards in use in India and 636.85 million debit cards. One of the reasons for the exponential rise in debit cards in India is the government’s Jan Dhan Yojna, a scheme of financial inclusiveness, which allows people to open bank accounts and receive India’s home grown RuPay branded debit cards. – Source: Reserve Bank of India According to the RBI, the rate of card transactions per head in India is one of the lowest in the world and is at the level of 6.7 now. You will be hard pressed to find a POS terminal or an ATM in the remote rural parts of the huge Indian landscape.
As the Indian central bank states, “The growth in the acceptance infrastructure has not been uniform across all locations in the country with […]
