The race for banks to get merchants on their UPI platform is on. Online payment aggregator ftcash has tied up with ICICI Bank for enabling payments on the Unified Payments Interface (UPI). ftcash is a virtual POS for micro-merchants to accept payments through credit cards, debit cards, wallets such as Freecharge, Mobikwik, PayPal etc. This partnership will enable ftcash to have UPI as a payment option for their customers and ICICI Bank would process the payment. Last week, Razorpay, a payment gateway aggregator, tied up with YES Bank, ICICI Bank and HDFC Bank for UPI payments. Similarly, Ezetap has also signed on with YES Bank for UPI payments. What banks get out of the deal: The deal will allow banks to get access to smaller merchants for UPI payments. Banks are allowed to charge a higher fee to merchants, rather than P2P payments on the UPI. Right now, for transactions on the UPI, merchants have to pay 0.75% for transactions less than Rs 2,000 to the banks and 1% for transactions above Rs 2,000. Typically, there will be a revenue sharing agreement with these aggregators with the banks. ftcash has not disclosed its revenue share but in the case of Razorpay, the banks agreed to share 20 basis points per UPI transaction with them for merchant. Currently, ftcash has more than 5000 merchants on its platform and aims to bring it up to 60 million micro-merchants such as milk vendors, newspaper agents, kirana stores etc. ftcash is backed by IcyCap Ventures.…
