With 54 Mn transactions, RuPay records 2X growth in e-comm payments

RuPay, the country-owned payment card payment system, has grown more popular among online shoppers and consolidated its market share in a year time.

According to NPCI latest data, RuPay cards e-commerce transactions shot up to double, 54 million in March from 25 million transactions last year April. Most of the contributors to the growth are reported to be public-sector bank account holders living in smaller towns.

The number of merchants accepting these cards has also increased to over 40 per cent. The RuPay Card is used both at the Point of Sale (PoS) as well as for e-commerce payments.

As per payment gateway firm Razorpay top five banks namely Punjab National Bank, State Bank of India, Union Bank of India, Central Bank of India and Indian Bank, are driving the growth.

Besides, NPCI is running campaigns to promote RuPay cards for merchant payments.

Amazon Pay offers a cashback of 10 per cent up to Rs 100 for new cards and 10 per cent up to Rs 25 for existing customers for the first transaction, said ET report quoting an NPCI spokesperson.

A payment firm Innoviti, which installs payment terminals at merchant outlets, claimed to witness overall card payments jump to 24 per cent in January from less than 14 per cent in May last year.

This year till March, the total RuPay point-of-sale (PoS) and online transactions accounted for payments of over Rs 1.1 lakh crore. However, RuPay swipes on PoS terminals declined to 56 million in March from a high of 75 million in July last year.

Launched in 2012, Rupay gained prominence during the start of the prime minister’s flagship account opening programme Jan-Dhan Yojna.

It claims to cater to the customers of international banks, including private, cooperative and regional rural banks customers. The total number of banks issuing RuPay cards are more than 1,000.

In comparison to its international rivals like Mastercard and Visa, RuPay is hailed as more cost-effective. RuPay Card share is said to have crossed over 65 percent of the payments done through debit and credit cards.

Citing over 7X growth, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley had also hailed the growth of plastic payments post demonetisation era. According to him, transactions value driven by debit and credit cards has increased to Rs 60.3 billion in September 2018 from Rs 8 billion before demonitasation.

Looking at the last year figure, RuPay is slowly but certainly picking up among online shoppers in the country. But it still has a long journey ahead of it.