Indians will soon pay cashless
Rejoice and say Good Bye to the bulging bum
Have you ever gone to a petrol pump and forgotten your wallet but you didn’t know you have forgotten your wallet until you were ready to pay for the fuel. That’s what happened to me recently and it was very embarrassing. While driving back I was brooding over the actual need of a wallet.
Imagine a digital India where we could buy the groceries from a Kirana store without cash or card! Get the car fueled up without waiting for the POS to receive signal! Cashless splitting amongst peers after luncheon without even signing the merchant bill copy!
The journey of payment embarked with “Cashless” system of BARTER has traversed a long way with currency coins & notes rolling over to plastic cards and heading back again to contemporary yet initial and traditional mode of “cashless” payments through Mobile wallets.
Promo codes and cash backs have persuaded the customers for download of various m wallets .Though Paytm has captured the lion’s share by taking the first mover advantage and also with the alluring offers because of massive funding from Alibaba and Tata group , yet the fund transfer from mobile to mobile is going through the labyrinth and transferring funds from mobile to account is cumbersome with the IFSC cliché.
In my own close group of friends and relatives, a bachelor user of a prepaid mobile likes Freecharge which helps in getting the mobile recharge along with a dominos / Mcdonalds free coupon sufficing for a single dinner or lunch while the other movie buff uses Mobikwik to claim cash back on every PVR ticket and myself being a loyal Uber customer has Paytm in store. None of us can transact through mobile wallets because all of us use different platforms.
Homo sapiens come with varied genes and generation, the Kirana wala would be using m-pesa while the Bhaaji Bhaiya would be using Airtel Money and the list goes on … …It’s time we integrate them all on a common platform .It’s time we taste the experience of Apple Pay in India through UPI.
Integrating bank accounts in a single app giving diverse options of usability through virtual ids, aadhar or mobile number, RBI has set the cat amongst the pigeons with UPI (Unified Payment Interface) as the threat for all M-wallet players. UPI will be pushing the envelope of the payment experience every day. Not only it will help the start-ups in reducing the cash on delivery but will also push the smartphone users for going cashless from Kirana shops to utility payments without browsing multiple websites.
The experience can be further accelerated with touch enabled phones and biometric authentication. But the Albatross around the neck is the number of smartphone users in the country, with the total population of 1324 million the number of smartphone users for the current year is estimated around 204 million only and projected increase is just another 100 million by 2019.
The real success of UPI will be its mass acceptance, when it can be accessed from any mobile from rural to metro centers with maximum merchants on board.
Image Credit : bloglovin.com/ howardforums.com
References : http://www.npci.org.in, Data Source : http://www.statista.com
