National Payments Corp targets one deal per POS a day this year

The company is planning to expand capacity to 40 million transactions a day, considering the increase in government transactions

National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) is targeting its RuPay Cards, a card scheme developed by the company, to be used for at least one transaction in every Point of Sale (POS) machines available in the country, by the end of the year.

The company, which currently has a capacity to handle 20 million transactions a day, will expand it to 40 million in order to facilitate all the government subsidy transactions, said M Balachandran, chairman, NPCI.

Speaking to reporters in a function where payment solution company GI Technology announced strategic partnership with Ratnakar Bank Ltd and Prabhu Money Transfer, part of Nepal-based Prabhu Bank Ltd, to offer Indo-Nepal remittance services for Nepali diaspora in India, Balachandran said, "We would like to see that RuPay is used at least one transaction in every POS machines in the country, apart from the ATM transactions. At present, it is only around 0.3 per cent or less than that. We want to achieve the target by the end of the year."

There are around 1.1 million POS available in the country at present and the target would mean that the company hitting at least 11 lakh transactions a day in POS across the country.

Around 170 million RuPay cards has been issued so far. The card is mostly used for ATM transactions and almost 12 per cent of the total interbank transactions in the country happen through RuPay, he said. The company

will conduct awareness programmes at least in 100 places in the country to promote using electronic money transaction, including direct usage cards for payments, he added. Almost 95 per cent of the total POS available in the country accept RuPay cards, he said.

It is currently seeing 14-15 million transactions a day and has a capacity to handle 20 million transactions a day. The transactions on the government subsidies has been increasing and considering this, the company is planning to expand the capacity to 40 million transactions a day.

The company, which has of late launched premium RuPay debit card for higher value transactions, is looking at launching credit card next year. The Bharat Bill Payment System, a platform for bill transactions, for which Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has assigned NPCI as the central unit, is expected to be ready by 2017. It is also working on tap and go transaction system, in which a card or mobile phone could be used to tap to transact money. The company would provide the platform to the banks.

NPCI, which has earlier announced partnership with with JCB International Company (JCBI) and US-based Discover Financial Services for card acceptance and issuance, said that it is in discussion with China's UnionPay for a similar tie up.

The company is also in the process of increasing its stakeholders from current 10 banks with another 49 banks, raising Rs 100 crore in the process. NPCI's existing promoter banks are State Bank of India, Punjab National Bank, Canara Bank, Bank of Baroda, Union Bank of India, Bank of India, ICICI Bank, HDFC Bank, Citibank, and HSBC. These 10 banks had contributed Rs 10 crore each to NPCI's paid-up capital.