Digital payments catching on, will grow to 1.5 billion a day: RBI

A Sadhu or a Hindu holy man pays the vendor through Paytm, a digital wallet company, after buying a book during the annual religious festival of Magh Mela in Allahabad

Digital payments in the country should touch 1.5 billion transactions a day if they keep growing at the current rate and the Reserve Bank of India is putting in place systems to support the growth, a top official of the central bank has said.

As many as 100 million digital transactions were being recorded daily in the country against 120 million reported before the coronavirus outbreak, said P Vasudevan, chief general manager, department of payments and settlement systems at the Reserve Bank of India.

“For context, in 2016 we were doing 22 million, now we are at 100 million, this shows that digital transactions are growing at an annual growth rate of 58 percent and the future of digital payments is tremendous and sizeable,” Vasudevan said at the virtual Global Fintech Fest on July 22.

Identifying opportunities for digital transactions, Vasudevan said toll payments wee rapidly digitised with FasTags, but that should not stop there. These would be extended beyond toll to parking and even for fuel retailing. Similarly, a large chunk of cash-on-delivery payments for ecommerce transactions could easily move to digital, he said.

“Eventually the need is to create an interoperable payment system between smartphone users, feature phone users and no phone users,” he added.

He also spoke about geo-tagging payments, saying it will shed light on areas seeing rapid adoption of payments and locations that were falling behind. It will enable the RBI to focus attention on certain geographies for popularising digital payments.

The banker also highlighted the need to generate more awareness about online frauds. Though in India the level of fraud was not alarming, initiatives like the centralised fraud registry, he added, would help track real-time data and also keep the industry informed of the kinds of crime being committed.