Better late than never: PayPal launches India operations

As India completes one year of demonitisation today, global digital payments giant PayPal has launched its domestic operations in India.

With this move, the US-based payments giant enters a long list of international players like Google (Tez), Facebook’s WhatsApp, TrueCaller, Amazon Pay, etc. looking to bet on the Indian digital payments space.

“It has been a year since demonetisation drive was announced. While a lot of people have started transacting digitally, it also exposes people to risks like theft and fraud. We will offer them a secure and fast means of transacting,” Rohan Mahadevan, CEO, PayPal, reported Mint.

Paypal, which especially banking on Buyer and Seller protection has been offering cross-border payments in India for close to a decade and claims to control a third of India's B2C export payments.

Also Read: Paytm integrates with BHIM UPI, aims double user base

This includes a 180-days dispute resolution window, which means PayPal will refund the money if an online seller does not send the goods purchased by the customer. PayPal will also pay the merchant in case the customer does not end up paying for the goods.

PayPal has also setup an Indian subsidiary with local call centers with multilingual support.

PayPal will act as a payment aggregator and work with banks to offer digital payment services to its customers. It is expected to use the Unified Payments Interface infrastructure through banks to facilitate domestic payments, as the company has not applied for a prepaid payments instrument (PPI) license from Reserve Bank of India to operate a digital wallet.

Also Read: Google eyes hot Indian payment space, sets to launch app ‘Tez’ on Monday

Post demonetisation, the digital payments ecosystem witnessed a growing interest of foreign players, looking to cash-in on the growing opportunity in India. As per recent NPCI data, total UPI transactions in October 2017 doubled to 76.96 million from 30.8 million in September 2017.