The Reserve Bank of India's deadline for accepting payments bank applications ended yesterday. Mrinal Sinha, head of strategy at digital payments company MobiKwik spoke to MediaNama about the company's plans for a payments bank and what the banking regulator is looking for in applicants. MediaNama: What is the Reserve Bank of India looking from applicants for a Payments Bank licence? Mrinal Sinha: First of all, the RBI has asked us for the capital structure for each of the companies, and how the capital structure can comply with the RBI needs from payments banks. Secondly it's asking for a business plan. And third is the banking related compliance, and what will companies do to meet RBI guidelines on those. Payments Bank will be subject to the same kind of capital and structuring requirement that banks are subjected to. What that means is that all Payments Banks, like scheduled commercial banks, need to be owned by resident Indians. There are also caps on how much foreign parties can own collectively and also how much each individual foreign party can hold. The implication of that on a lot of other PPI (Prepaid Payment Instruments / wallet) players is that, there are a number of other PPI players, who have a lot of their equity base owned by foreign investors. They're going to have to prove to the RBI that over time they will migrate some of the shareholding from external investors to resident Indians. Mobikwik is owned and controlled by resident Indians, so…
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