The Reserve Bank of India has defined a vision for digital payments from 2019 to 2021, to "empower every Indian with access to a bouquet of e-payment options that is safe, secure, convenient, quick and affordable." To this end, it says it intends to follow an approach that enhances customer experience, empowers payment systems operators and infrastructure, puts in forward looking regulation, and establishes a risk-focused supervision system. Expected outcomes The RBI has identified the following 12 specific outcomes: 1. Reduce paper-based clearing as a percentage of retail payments: it is expected that the volume of cheque-based payments would be less than 2% of retail electronic transactions by 2021. 2. Accelerated growth in individual retail electronic payment systems: UPI is expected to grow, on an average annualised basis, over 100%, and NEFT at 40%, till December 2021. The number of digital transactions is expected to be 8,707 crore in December 2021. 3. Digital payment transaction turnover vis-à-vis GDP (at market prices-current price) is expected to increase to 10.37 in 2019, 12.29 in 2020 and 14.80 in 2021. 4. Debit card transactions at Point of Sale to increase to 35%, and "continued growth in PPI transactions". 5. Debit card usage at PoS to be at least 44% of total debit card transactions (at PoS + ATM). In value terms it is 15.2 per cent in 2018-19 (5.2 per cent in 2014-15) which is expected to be 22% by end 2021. 6. Card payments/acceptance: 6.1: Increased deployment of card acceptance infrastructure across…
