Our mobility card may be better than OysterPay: PayCraft's Ambarish Parekh

'We are implementing a mobile-based QR payment in offline mode in one of our upcoming Metro projects', said Parekh

Set up in 2013, PayCraft enables issuance of payment cards for both off-line small ticket payments in the transit segment, as well as for routine retail purchases and spends. It has been central in creating the interface for the National Common Mobility Card. Ambarish Parekh, the firm’s chief experience officer, spoke to Raghu Mohan. Edited excerpts:

How far are we from having a mobility card like OysterPay of the UK in India?

OysterPay is a closed-loop solution that works only at merchants that have been on-boarded on it. In India, with the advent of the National Common Mobility Card (NCMC), we’ve moved to a complete open-loop ecosystem where a bank-issued card will work both in offline mobility payments as well as online point-of-sale, e-commerce and ATM transactions. So, from a technology and specification perspective, we are already there, or may be, even ahead of OysterPay. But from an implementation perspective on a scale of 10, we should be at 7 now.

Basically, we have two parts. The specification of the NCMC, and the technology developed by service providers like us to implement the prime minister’s vision of ‘One-Nation-One-Card’. NCMC is the specification, which was developed by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) and PayCraft was part of the specifications drafting committee.

We have played a crucial role in the implementation of the open-loop payment system for offline payments in the transit and mobility sector for small-ticket payments. Going forward, concrete steps are being taken to bring offline payments into retail payments too, especially in areas where connectivity can be an issue.

When you say from an implementation perspective you are at 7 on a scale of 10 now, what will you have on maturity?

From a technical standpoint, if a mobility card has been issued to you on any Metro, the same card will also work for commuting on every Metro in India which has implemented payment acceptance of NCMC standards. From a customer perspective, the Mumbai Metro card will also work on, say, the Noida Metro or the Delhi Metro Airport Express Line, to cater to their ticket payments. That said, we still have some issues to sort out on the interoperability of these cards to work in a seamless manner across all metros.

NPCI is addressing these issues proactively, and we expect the interoperability ecosystem to be in place for seamless reconciliation and settlement, top-ups and dispute settlement. Then, you will see large-scale adoption of ‘One-Nation-One-Card’. Commuters will be able to travel on a single ticket across multiple modes of transport for their journey.

Where does PayCraft come into all of this?

We are the technology-service provider to implement the entire ticketing and payment system for the open-loop payment at a metro station — both from a card issuer and card acceptance perspective. We partner with banks to implement the ecosystem on behalf of the transport authorities.

We provide the entire backend ticketing and payment ecosystem in order to compute the fare, issue the card as well as accept the card, for you to tap the card at the gate to open and allow you to travel. The same card also works when you come out of the Metro station and pay at any restaurant, or do an online purchase, or even withdraw money from the ATM.

Why can’t credit cards double up as mobility cards, and give a fillip to small-ticket offline payments and improve spends?

When a transaction takes place in a Metro or on a bus, you are not connecting to the card network — it doesn’t go online. Credit, debit and prepaid cards are issued on EMV specifications and hence, not enabled for offline transactions. For a card to work in an offline environment as per a NPCI directive, it should be issued on NCMC specifications.

Recently, the RBI came out with guidelines for offline payments in the retail environment too. You see, sometimes when a card is inserted in the PoS machine, it fails to make the payment, as there are connectivity issues. With offline card payments enabled, you will be able to pay for your bar of chocolate, and the transaction will be processed in an offline mode.

In such a scenario there is a balance, which is maintained on the card-chip. The transaction is processed from the chip balance, and whenever in future the card comes online, the card balances are synced with the online issuer host system.

Do you mean to say that the national mobility card can enable digitisation in a very big way?

As far as traffic management is concerned, queues will reduce at ticket counters, the number of passengers travelling per minute will increase, and the experience of customers will become seamless. The movement of cash will come down and the cost of cash handling will be reduced. And with 5G, lots of value-added services will come up.

Besides the ‘One-Nation-One-Card’, the government is committed to implementing offline payments in all spheres of the card payment ecosystem. We are implementing a mobile-based QR payment in offline mode in one of our upcoming Metro projects. All this will enable digitisation of small-ticket payments even in non-network areas, and will lead to digitisation at the bottom of the pyramid.