Navigating the payment world without cash
“Every adversity is an opportunity for someone else” was one of the favorite statements that my teachers used to tell me in school.
Perhaps the best example of this, which I found in recent times, is how mobile payments are fast changing the economic landscape in countries like India.
Though I had seen the rapid pace at which such payments have been making an impact in Hong Kong and on the Chinese mainland, little did I know that companies like Paytm are driving their use in India and elsewhere.
During a taxi ride from Bengaluru to Hosur, India, my driver, Antony, asked me whether I could make the payment for the ride through the Paytm platform. I was surprised to hear that, as I was one of those who believed that cash was still king in India. However, during the course of the onehour ride Antony went on to tell me the various things he could do with his Paytm account, ranging from the payment of school fees to a meal at an ordinary restaurant and booking cinema tickets.
He even pointed to a sticker on the windshield of his car, which enabled payments at toll gates by linking to a payment platform with a quick code.
“I hardly carry my wallet these days,” he said with a chuckle.
Paytm’s success is no doubt changing the mobile payment landscape in India, but it may be some time before the country switches over completely, as China has.
While Paytm can count on support from Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, which has invested in the Indian company, it could soon face competition from other entrants.
Alibaba and Tencent have single-handedly popularized the concept of cashless payments in China and made the country a world leader in the adoption of technology for daily necessities.
Ant Financial’s Alipay and Tencent’s WeChat Pay are now all set to make inroads in developing countries in Asia and other places where consumers have relatively less access to traditional credit cards and banking services. Yang Xinyun, a spokeswoman for Ant Financial, said Alipay had about 280 million overseas users and 520 million users in China at the end of last year.
T.B. Nair, an independent industry analyst in Bengaluru, believes that mobile payment platforms will help millions of Indians overcome the hassles of dealing in cash.
“It will fuel India’s efforts to become a truly cashless economy,” he said, though conceding that the country still has some catching up to do, compared with economies like China.
Consider the facts: Mobile payments for the first 10 months of 2017 stood at 81 trillion yuan ($12.77 trillion) in China, compared with 58.8 trillion yuan for all of 2016, according to data from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.
China’s transformation into a cashless society is something that has helped unleash tremendous energy in the economy, industry analysts say.
But for many like me, the concept of making a payment when eating out or shopping by scanning a QR code still sounds strange.
I must confess that I am still in a minority in a country where even the street vendors accept payments through QR codes. So much so that I still have not linked my bank cards to either WeChat Pay or Alipay. Call it reluctance to change with the times or refusal to adapt to technology.