New Umbrella Entity: Ushering Payment Revolution

India has been on the cusp of a technological revolution driven by fintech companies.

- Uday Kumar Khazane

The last decade has seen tremendous growth in the retail payment segment in our country and the definitive push from the government of India like demonetization and GST implementation has propelled this segment to the next orbit. The pandemic has accelerated the adoption of digital payments in India, especially retail digital payments. In the past year, retail digital payments have seen huge growth as more people gravitated towards digital modes of transaction owing to fear of contracting the virus and convenience.

Transactions through National Electronic Funds Transfer (NEFT), National Electronic Toll Collection (NETC), and the Bharat Bill Payment System (BBPS) registered acceleration over the previous year. Other retail payment platforms such as Unified Payments Interface (UPI), Immediate Payment Service (IMPS), and National Automated Clearing House (NACH) saw a near doubling of both transaction volume from 12.5 billion to 22.3 billion, and value from Rs 21.3 trillion to Rs 41 trillion between FY2020 and 2021. The entire retail payment architecture in India is dominated by state-owned NPCI via its UPI system.

The recent approval of new umbrella entities (NUE) licensing by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) will lead to increased private participation in the Indian digital payments space. To further develop digital payment infrastructure and increase competition RBI introduced a framework for the entry of private players for retail payments in August 2020. The framework enables private companies to apply for NUE licenses and create a retail payment system against UPI. Unlike NPCI, which is a non-profit entity, NUE will be for-profit, enabling entities to charge fees for online transactions.

This has attracted big Indian business houses like Reliance and Tata, as well as global giants like Amazon, Facebook, and Google. Technology giants Facebook Inc., Amazon.com