“ToneTag, India’s largest voice-based commerce and payments solution provider aims to deploy its ground-breaking technology to resolve digital payment issues faced by micro and small businesses across the country. Through strategic partnerships with major global fintech players, the company is taking steps towards achieving this goal and has already reached and deployed this solution in over 100,000 small businesses and stores across India working with partners like Google, Amazon, ICICI Bank, NSDL and few others.”

“Leading payments and API banking solutions company, Cashfree Payments is now offering India’s widest ‘Buy Now Pay Later’ (BNPL) suite. Cashfree Payments’ BNPL suite will enable online businesses to provide customers with over 30 flexible financing options during checkout. The company has launched its BNPL suite in time for the upcoming holiday season to help online businesses offer their customers easy and instant access to credit, thereby increasing sales.”

“Expressing concerns about cryptocurrencies, Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Governor Shaktikanta Das on Wednesday said these virtual assets could cause the next financial crisis and should be prohibited. “Our view is it should be prohibited because if it is allowed to grow… the next financial crisis will come from private cryptocurrencies,” said the Governor speaking at an event held in Mumbai. Highlighting the volatility and uncertainty in cryptocurrencies, he said the value of virtual currencies has come down to $140 billion and $40 billion was wiped out.”

“The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has ordered Cashfree, Razorpay and Stripe to pause merchant on-boarding until the central bank issues them the payment aggregator (PA) licence it has tentatively approved for them, says a report from Entrackr. Last month, RBI asked Paytm Payments Services (Paytm) Ltd to re-submit the application to operate as a PA and not to on-board new online merchants until approvals remain pending.”

“One97 Communications (OCL), parent company of Paytm, has rolled out “Paytm Payment Protect”. The group insurance plan has been launched in association with HDFC ERGO General Insurance. The plan has been introduced to insure transactions made via Unified Payments Interface (UPI) across all apps and wallets. This plan intends to enhance the experience of digital payments and increase the adoption of the same in India. The insurance offering comes at a price of as low as Rs 30 per year.”

“NOW Money, the GCC’s first mobile banking solution focused on financial inclusion, and ThetaRay, a leading provider of AI-powered transaction monitoring technology, today announced a collaboration to implement ThetaRay’s cloud-based AML solution to monitor cross-border payments and support in the prevention of financial crimes and money laundering on the fintech’s payments platform. NOW Money selected ThetaRay’s advanced SONAR anti-money laundering solution with combined transaction monitoring and sanctions list screening to stay a step ahead of financial crime by uncovering both known and unknown money-laundering crimes, as well as preventing attempts to violate sanctions in real time. The new partnership is essential as the number of overbroad money transfers continues to grow, with the value of remittances from the UAE being Dh 2.88 trillion* (780 billion USD) in Q1 2022.”

“A month into India’s pilot project for using an official digital rupee for inter-bank and institutional transactions, stakeholders are seeing no benefits, several bankers said. Seven bankers told Reuters that using the e-rupee of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) was much the same as internet-based banking that users were already satisfied with. The RBI has devised the e-rupee basically as a digital alternative to cash – one using blockchain distributed-ledger technology, to some degree anonymous and most relevant to consumers and retailers. But in the initial trial banks have been using it for settlements with each other – with no particular advantage, according to bankers.”

“In a bid to enable financial inclusion for the country’s SMEs, HDFC Bank, India’s largest private bank, has partnered with embedded FinTech platform, Mintoak to create an ecosystem for them, starting with payments. HDFC Bank’s SmartHub Vyapar was developed by Mintoak’s API-first, cloud-native tech to seamlessly deliver payment acceptance and access to commerce enablement solutions for the merchant in one place. Today, SMEs are in digital chaos with multiple QRs and payment apps apart from other digital elements like bookkeeping apps, POS solutions etc. While most of these options are widely available for the merchants, the sheer effort of managing them is becoming a distraction. Consolidation of payments on one platform is a way forward that can ease the merchant’s pain and allow them to concentrate efforts on their business and key revenue drivers. Amongst the many players jostling for relevance at the merchant counter, this consolidation depends on two aspects (1) Technology that matches or is better than what merchants are currently using, and (2) Offered by someone merchants can trust.”

“The Payments Council of India (PCI), the apex body of payments and settlement players in the country, has launched an initiative named ‘Project Pratima’ to standardise icons for payments across apps and platforms to make it easier for customers to identify digital payment icons. Gaurav Chopra, Executive Director of PCI told Moneycontrol, “It is a project which PCI has undertaken to standardise icons of most common use cases in payments. The main idea behind this is to safeguard people against fraud and increase adoption of digital payments. Standardised icons will help users identify payments actions correctly.”   Pratima means ‘icon’ in Sanskrit. The project’s website says that it aims to improve the trust, security, and familiarity of digital payment icons in a bid to avoid instances of customers falling prey to fraud or making mistakes while conducting payment transactions.”

“India has decided to extend the deadline on capping the share of digital payment transactions by about two years to Dec. 31, 2024, the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) said on Friday. The NPCI had said in late 2020 that payment firms will not be allowed to process more than 30% of the total volume of transactions on UPI from Jan 1. The move comes as a breather to companies like Walmart Inc’s PhonePe and Alphabet Inc’s Google, which are among the leading digital money transfer apps in the country.”

“The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has announced its first retail digital Rupee pilot will commence on December 1, 2022. “The pilot will test the robustness of the entire process of digital rupee creation, distribution and retail usage in real time,” said RBI. The pilot works like this: Participating banks distribute the e-rupee (e₹-R), in the same denominations available as notes and coins, into digital wallets stored on mobile phones. These deposits can in turn be used for transactions among individuals, or to acquire goods and services from merchants. Merchant payments can be made using QR codes. The e₹-R will not earn any interest but can be converted to other forms of money. RBI said the digital currency would offer the same features of physical cash – like trust, safety and settlement finality. In late October, RBI detailed that the pilot would include “closed user groups comprising customers and merchants,” but operation-related specifics would be revealed in “due course.” The first phase of the pilot will start off with four banks (State Bank of India, ICICI Bank, Yes Bank and IDFC First Bank) in four cities (Mumbai, New Delhi, Bengaluru and Bhubaneswar.) It will later expand to four more banks (Bank of Baroda, Union Bank of India, HDFC Bank and Kotak Mahindra Bank) and nine more cities (Ahmedabad, Gangtok, Guwahati, Hyderabad, Indore, Kochi, Lucknow, Patna and Shimla).”

“India’s federal government has released a new draft bill for public comment on personal data protection after months of extensive consultations with relevant stakeholders. Labeled the Digital Data Protection Act 2022, the reworked draft bill has been described by the union minister for railways, communications, electronics and information technology Ashwini Vaishnaw as balanced in scope and favorable for India’s digital economic growth, reports the Financial Times (FT).”

“Airtel Payments Bank announced the launch of a face authentication-based savings bank account opening for customers. The payments bank said the facility would further ease the account opening, making it seamless and convenient for customers. Airtel Payments Bank is the first Payments Bank in the country to offer this facility.The payments bank said the new facility would help business correspondents (BCs) of the bank to open an account just by undertaking face authentication through electronic know-your-customers (e-KYC).The authentication is processed using a newly developed mobile application by the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), the payments bank said, adding that, the business correspondent will now only need a smartphone to open an account. The bank will make this facility available across all its 500,000 banking points by the end of this year, it said.”

“While the unified payments interface (UPI) transactions race to reach a billion transactions per day mark, a potential confrontation has been developing between regulations that call for UPI to remain free and Reserve Bank of India regulations that permit banks to cap the number of withdrawals from savings accounts. According to research by Ashish Das of IIT-Bombay, this disagreement can be resolved if the RBI assumes responsibility for UPI payment costs in the same way that it does for currency transaction costs. According to the report, certain banks have restricted the number of debits made to savings accounts. The report comes as the RBI is looking for feedback on payment fees. The government, on the other hand, is adamant that UPI should retain its freedom. Although the central bank has not commented on restricting transactions, it had previously suggested that banks could set a limit on the number of withdrawals from savings accounts. Fintech firms and banks have stated that UPI transaction costs must be borne by someone, at least for merchant payments. The research reads, “On the one side, there is a regulation that supports limiting the number of withdrawals, but on the other, the RBI has a goal for using financial services and moving the country toward a cashless society through digital methods through their financial inclusion agenda. The two policies conflict with one another.””

“In November 2019, Alphabet-owned Google wrote to the US Federal Reserves, asking the central bank to design its upcoming instant payments system FedNow on the lines of India’s Unified Payments Interface or UPI. It said, an open payments system fosters collaboration between technology and financial service providers, adding that India’s approach attained “amazing” results for banks, consumers and other players within the payments ecosystem. In 2021, UPI processed around 39 billion transactions totalling $940 billion, equivalent to 31% of India’s GDP. As if on cue, in August 2020, the National Payments Corporation of India, which operates UPI, launched NPCI International Payments, a subsidiary tasked with exporting NPCI’s indigenously developed offerings like UPI and the RuPay card network to foreign markets.”