Like AliPay and WeChat in China, payment applications PayTM and Google Tez are experiencing incredible growth in India. The growth can be attributed in part to a matter of circumstances. India has been a cash-based economy with cards and other electronic forms of payment having relatively low acceptance. Mobile apps are a substantial improvement and readily available to the mass market. An article in ZDNet reflects not only on the rapid growth of these apps, but that they circumvented traditional banks and card networks in the process:
The Economic Times reports that in just four months of Google launching their own payments service, Google Tez, the US firm is processing the same number of digital transactions as one of India’s top private banks — Axis, fourth overall in the payments sphere in its sector.
And just last month the Reserve Bank of India reported that transactions made through the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) — a kind of middleware that stitches all providers onto one platform for seamless interoperability and allows apps belonging to sellers to connect directly to a consumer’s bank account — was roughly half of that of all debit and credit card transactions. As the piece mentions, it took a company like Mastercard 30 years to build its business that is now being surpassed in a handful of years.
Overview by Sarah Grotta, Director, Debit and Alternative Products Advisory Service at Mercator Advisory Group
Read the quoted story here
