IRCTC to pilot its own payment gateway by May

Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corp (IRCTC) is all set to pilot its in-house payment gateway in a month's time.

The service will be rolled out in phases once testing is done. According to Mint report which quoted people close to the development, the payment gateway is called 'ipay'.

The move is to reduce dependency on third-party payment services providers as IRCTC eyes additional revenues. IRCTC revenue verticals include catering and hospitality, bottled water Rail Neer, travel and tourism, and internet ticketing.

Travel and tourism grew 41 per cent in 2016-17 to Rs 527.35 crore, contributing the most to the company’s revenue at 34 per cent.

IRCTC sells reportedly over 12 lakh tickets a month.

At present, payment platforms such as Mobikwik, PayU and Paytm, power IRCTC’s railway ticket booking transactions through their gateways. Last month, Razorpay had tied with IRCTC to help customers transact online through Unified Payments Interface (UPI).

Third party payment gateways pay around Rs 75 lakh-1 Crore for a one-time licensing fee to integrate with IRCTC’s website and mobile app and in return share revenues with IRCTC on every transaction that goes through them.

However, none of the payment gateways have commented on the impact of such a move by IRCTC. IRCTC has not responded to Entrackr's queries on the recent development till the publication of the report.

In its 2016-2017 annual report, IRCTC on an average sold 573,000 e-tickets daily. IRCTC saw a 26 per cent drop in Internet ticketing revenue to Rs 466.05 crore in the financial year 2016-17. Despite selling more than 10 million tickets in compare to 2015-16, value of ticket booked online increased merely by 2 % to Rs 24,485.21 crore.

Meanwhile, for technology and back-end support, IRCTC is working with a startup MMAD communications.

Earlier, IRCTC had barred many banks from its platform and refused to use their payment gateways. The banks refused to share a portion of the convenience fees, earned on customer transactions with IRCTC, calling it a violation of the principles of the merchant-acquiring business.