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All hope on e-Rupi to boost India's fintech sector

by VARINDIA 2021-12-27

The newly launched e-Rupi digital payments platform, India has now taken its first step towards having its own digital currency. India’s consumer digital economy which was pegged at $85-90 billion in calendar year 2020, is expected to become a $800 billion market by 2030. Today, over 90 per cent of the orders fulfilled by the online commerce get done by the new age logistics, an industry which has come up only in the last one decade and has solved for the above challenges through technology and customer centric mindset. Digital payments are becoming quite ubiquitous in India.

The government has now come up with a plan for leveraging the digital infrastructure so that there is ‘leak-proof delivery’ of its welfare schemes. Now the e-Rupi can be comparable to a prepaid voucher, that is redeemable at specific centres. What is even more special about it, is that one does not need any credit or debit card, mobile app or internet banking to use it.

Developed by the NPCI in collaboration with the Department of Financial Services, Ministry of Health and Welfare and National Health Authority, e-Rupi seeks to connect beneficiaries and service providers digitally, making it a personal purpose-specific payments platform. The Indian economy has always been largely cash-dependent, and while the government has been making efforts to digitise the economy, still much remains to be done.

With this new platform, the government hopes to encourage as well as accelerate the adoption of digital payments and bring down the cash to GDP ratio. With more and more people overcoming their wariness about digital transactions, fintech, in turn, will be able to reach out to more consumers who had earlier been left out by the formal economy and financial services sector, especially in rural India. Going forward, the biggest advantages , which we can foresee of e-Rupi is the penetration of digital transactions, which of course has been a fintech focus as well.