With 459 Mn transaction in FY18, RuPay registers over 2.5X growth in value to $2.5 Bn

Indian Government backed payment scheme RuPay seems to be steadily growing as a major form of digital payments. India's domestic card scheme usage at point-of-sales (PoS) devices has climbed 135 per cent to 459 million transactions in FY 2018.

This year figure has added 200 million more transactions than 195 million in 2017. Even in 2016, it reportedly recorded jump of 600 per cent PoS transactions.

Of late, NPCI, which manages RuPay, has been pushing up adoption for cards among users for merchant transactions. It also had partnered with Big Bazaar to run promotional scheme and tied up with many retailers and e-commerce portals including BookMyShow, Redbus, MakeMyTrip, and Bigbasket.

Govt had also promoted it aggressively by offering cashback.

Besides RuPay card usage at e-commerce websites shows a 137 per cent jump to reach 208 million transactions. The figure was 87.5 million in 2017. In terms of the value of payments, the transactions stood at Rs 16,600 crore against Rs 5,934 crore in 2017.

Dilip Asbe, chief executive at National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), who believes that RuPay will give tough competition to international card giants such as Visa and Mastercard.

Meanwhile, it's also working on a project to issue a common card for both ATM and PoS transactions.

At present, around eight banks are live on the project. And in next six months, 30 to 40 banks will join the bandwagon. This will lead to a huge spike in overall transactions, Asbe was quoted as saying in ET report.

After its inception six years ago, the number of users has gone up following the government introduction of Jan Dhan Yojana. Now, according to an estimate, around 40 per cent of all cards issued in the country are RuPay cards.

Paytm Payment Bank also offers RuPay debit cards. Earlier, it was mostly given out by public sector banks.

The card payment scheme has pushed issuance of the debit card from 35 banks to about 1,000 banks now, enabling more people to use them for digital transactions.

It claims to have gained much traction in last three years in smaller locations (tier II, III and semi-urban areas).

Asbe had earlier said that RuPay cards will reach the second spot, competing against international players in the market, among schemes on value and volume done on PoS machines and e-commerce.

Industry experts also think that RuPay has been showing strong adoption among the masses especially with payments slowly going digital in rural India. They hail cost-effectiveness is the primary and significant differentiator between RuPay and other international card networks.