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Come April, you can use RuPay even online

The desi version of card payment platform – RuPay – is moving to the next level.

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The desi version of card payment platform – RuPay – is moving to the next level. Come April, the cardholders can make transactions even online too, marking the next step for an offering rolled out by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) almost two years ago.

In the beginning, RuPay was ATM-only, but NPCI later started issuing debit cards for off-line retail purchases. The current move, which allows RuPay cards to be used for e-commerce payments, is bound to intensify competition for global rivals like Visa and MasterCard. For, RuPay cards come significantly cheaper.

These online-enabled cards may turn attractive for mainstream banks, unlike ATM-only and debit ones, which are targeted more towards co-operative and regional rural banks, and rural and semi-urban bank branches, respectively, because of less internet-savvy clientele there.

“Mainstream banks will not issue RuPay cards to their customers till the e-commerce option is enabled. From April, they will start issuing,” said A P Hota, managing director and CEO, NPCI. To begin with, two banks will issue new RuPay cards from the second half of April, and others are likely to follow suit, Hota added.

However, a lot of work needs to be done on RuPay debit cards as a big chunk of point-of-sale (POS) terminals does not still accept them. Currently, only 25% of POS terminals across India accept these debit cards, said Hota. NPCI hopes to wrap up the roll-out by July this year.

“Banks have to put field staff on the job to visit each POS terminal and install RuPay software there. These terminals have Visa, MasterCard and American Express software in them already,” said Hota. There are almost 8 lakh POS terminals in India as of January 2013, according to data from the Reserve Bank of India.

For now, NPCI is not in a hurry to offer RuPay credit cards anytime soon. Even as March 2015 has been set as the cut-off line for the credit card business launch, Hota remains sceptical whether that could be met. This is simply because it’s the debit card project that is hogging all the attention now.

@MeghaMandavia

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