IRCTC's payment gateway gains traction, handles 125,000 transactions daily

IRCTC introduces Autopay feature to ensure more reliable ticket booking

The inhouse payment gateway of Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC), i-PAY, is now processing more than 125,000 transactions every day. A statement from IRCTC said that i-PAY facilitates payments for booking railway tickets, air tickets and tour packages on the IRCTC website and mobile app.

It is one of the multiple payment gateways available to users on the IRCTC website and mobile apps.

“When launched in the month of Apr-2019, i-PAY did only 5.8 per cent of total online rail ticket booking, which has increased to 13 per cent. At present, i-PAY has been made live in various business verticals of IRCTC such as Air ticketing, Tourism, i-mudra and e-ticketing,” a IRCTC statement said.

A payment gateway acts as a medium between an ecommerce website and a banking transaction website. IRCTC officials said there are no plans currently to extend the i-PAY platform to other ecommerce website to facilitate more transactions.

IRCTC said that it has also recently introduced a new feature of ‘Autopay’, for the IRCTC Website and Mobile App users that will be using the i-PAY payment gateway. “In this feature, a user has to allow for debit to his UPI bank account or other payment instrument through a mandate facility which creates a lien (blocked amount) on his payment instrument,” an IRCTC statement said

“Using this feature, money will by debited for booking a ticket only once the waitlisted ticket under Tatkal quota gets confirmed,” the statement added.

Simply put, users can key in their account details and allow the IRCTC website to deduct the ticket booking amount once a confirmed ticket is available to them. If the Tatkal waitlisted ticket remains in waitlist even after chart preparation, only applicable charge (such as Cancellation Charges, IRCTC Convenience Fee and Mandate Charges) will get deducted from user’s account and the blocked amount will be released.

Also, if a ticket is not confirmed, the blocked amount can be used to book another one. It will also mean speedier refunds.

According to IRCTC, the AutoPay feature also ensures higher reliability of ticket booking through the pre authorize mandate as it reduces the user’s time in keying in the payment instrument details at the time of booking.

“The user’s bank account will get debited only once the system generates the PNR (Passenger Name Record). AutoPay is more beneficial where ticket does not get booked even after deduction of payment from the user’s Bank account due to ‘Berth choice not met’ or ‘No Room’ scenarios,” the IRCTC statement said.

“This gives the financial freedom to customers in above mentioned cases where customers want to do the subsequent bookings on the same/next day without worrying for credit of the refund amount into their Bank Account from IRCTC,” the statement added.