RBI plans to make India a global payments powerhouse by 2025

20 Jun 2022 , 09:06 AM

The Reserve Bank’s ‘Payments Vision 2025‘ plan, which wants to triple the volume of digital payments, is progressive, according to industry leaders, and intends to build India as a worldwide payments powerhouse.

In light of rising geopolitical threats, the RBI released its ‘Payments Vision 2025’ document on Friday (20-06-2022), which discusses the ring-fencing of domestic payment systems and the necessity to enforce local processing of payment transactions.

‘E-Payments for Everyone, Everywhere, every time’ (4Es) is the central subject of the vision papers, with the overarching goal of providing every user with safe, secure, rapid, easy, accessible, and inexpensive e-payment choices.

Rajesh Mirjankar, MD and CEO of Kiya.ai, said the Payments Vision 2025 is innovative and has the potential to develop India as a global payments powerhouse.

“One of the most important forward-looking initiatives is the internationalization of UPI, RTGS, NEFT, and RuPay cards,” said Mirjankar. “Bilateral treaties with nations, particularly those covering the USD, GBP, and Euro, will greatly benefit Indian residents and their counterparts overseas with online realization at lower costs.”

With a steady push from the government and the emergence of rural fintech, Dilip Modi, founder of Spice Money, noted that as the epidemic raged over the country, India was on its way to realizing its payments goal, and digital payments expanded dramatically in volume and popularity.

It’s encouraging that the RBI is taking steps to improve safety and security for rural residents, where digital and financial literacy remain major difficulties, he added.

Inclusion and innovation, according to Anand Kumar Bajaj, founder, MD, and CEO of PayNearby are two of the most important goals of the RBI paper.

“Deepening our interaction with stakeholders and expanding our outreach deeper into the actual economy is critical if we are to achieve our mutual objective of financial inclusion for everyone.”

“As a result, interacting with private firms that are already present in people’s lives and moving commerce up to the bottom of the pyramid is critical,” Kumar explained.

India has made amazing progress in payments in the last few years, according to Avinash Godkhindi, MD and CEO of Zaggle, with UPI and RuPay being the major success stories.

“Taking them worldwide will solidify India’s position as the unchallenged global payment leader. Linking credit cards to UPI, as well as the globalization of India’s Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), will be game-changers “Godkhindi said.

According to the RBI, overall digital payments surged by 216 percent in volume and 10% in value in March 2022 compared to March 2019.

Paper instrument usage, on the other hand, has decreased dramatically during the same time period, with its proportion of total retail payments falling from 3.83 percent to 0.88 percent in volume and from 19.62 percent to 11.47 percent in value.

The central bank said in a statement that the paper, titled “Payments Vision 2025,” was created after taking into account feedback from various stakeholders as well as recommendations from the RBI’s Board for Regulation and Supervision of Payment and Settlement Systems.