I’ve been keenly reading, watching, and partaking in the various ways India’s consumer-payments space has been evolving since its Big Bang moment in 2016 (the demonetisation of most of India’s currency notes). Keeping up as a consumer is hard enough as it is, keeping up as a journalist is close to impossible.
Especially since every few months there is some behind-the-scenes rejigging of regulations, recommendations, fees or protocols in the alphabet soup of solutions. Products are launched with great pomp, only to become quiet when they don’t succeed at scale. Loopholes are found, used and plugged. Banks fight fintechs. Fintechs fight regulators.
It’s crazy because that’s how much money there is at stake. Heck, its payments. So it's all just money! The latest disruptors to enter this mad battlefield are credit cards. Yes, they’ve been around for decades. But that’s just for the old and boring case of making merchant payments directly. What if credit cards could be used to make UPI payments? That’s right. Using an old and boring payment instrument to pay for a new, and cool payment protocol. My head spins.
Thankfully we have figured this out much better. The NPCI, grand parent of digital payments, wants to take advantage of its own RuPay brand of credit cards to make UPI-based credit-card payments ahead of rivals Visa and Mastercard.
