India's largest private sector bank ICICI Bank will be launching its digital wallet this year, the bank's executive director Rajiv Sabharwal said in a press meet earlier this week. The digital wallet will be working on near-field communications (NFC) technology and enable payments over mobile devices which have the same. Note that earlier this month, ICICI Bank launched its NFC-enabled cards in three cities and so far the bank has introduced over 1200 Electronic Data Capture (EDC) machines capable of accepting contactless payments. Sabharwal commented that the next phase will be to get NFC on mobile for payments and that cards as a payments system will still exist. He also added that the new NFC readers will be able to process payments from both mobile and from NFC cards from other banks. " That's how the ecosystem will have to work. Even if any of my competitor launches an NFC card, they will have to ensure their POS machines will accept all other cards. Similarly I will have to also," Sabharwal said. Currently, customers have to enter a PIN when they use ICICI Bank's NFC cards in accordance to the Reserve Bank of India's guidelines for card payments, but a digital wallet could remove the requirement for entering a pin and hence process payments faster. The RBI on its part said that it will be introducing guidelines for single factor authentications for small ticket payments. Other banks' NFC payments plans Rival HDFC Bank too said that it will launch a digital…
