India’s payment apps battle to catch China
■ dominate the market. “India will remain a multiple-player model where the consumer has a choice to continue to use his bank account, and for the last mile can use any app which he sees fit,” said Dilip Asbe, the chief executive officer of National Payments Corp of India. “We give equal opportunities to both small and large players, unlike China,” he added.
Asbe is confident that his country’s open payments platform will eventually allow it to catch up with China, where Ant Financial’s Alipay and Tencent Holdings’ WeChat Pay are omnipresent and have sharply reduced the use of cash for payments in the past five years or so. The so-called Unified Payments Interface managed by SCAN ME Cashless India: Counting down to a digital revolution
NPCI currently houses 87 apps offered by Google, PayTM and other third parties, as well as many of the nation’s lenders. Facebook’s WhatsApp payment service remains in beta mode.
Despite its open model and the multitude of competitors, India has a long way to go. Some 72 per cent of India’s consumer transactions take place in cash, double the rate in China, according to a March report by Credit Suisse Group AG.
In India, digital payments have climbed more than five times since 2015 to 22.4 transactions per person in the year ended March, Reserve Bank of India figures show. That’s still way below China, where cashless transactions per capita totalled 96.7 in 2017, according to an RBI report based on Bank for International Settlements data.
Asbe wants to expand the UPI’s user base five-fold over the coming five years, to 500 million people from 100 million at present, or less than 8 per cent of the population. The target would raise the proportion to about 38 per cent, and bring the country closer to China, where WeChat Pay alone has 800 million users.