India’s digital payments market will be more than triple from $3 trillion to $10 trillion by 2026, and digital payments’ overall share is more than 40% as of today. The new digital payment revolution has helped remodel the lives of millions, giving them easy access to monetary services with just one click. Digital payments are hassle-free, comprehensive and convenient.
In India, the RTGs and NEFT payments systems are in hand and operated by the National Payments Corporation. Other systems like IMPS, RuPay, UPI, and a couple of others are in hand and also operated by the National Payments Corporation. Digital payments are enabled through multi-factor authentication or a QR Code Scan. They are free from all types of cyber-attacks such as phishing, key logging, spyware, malware but prone to social engineering crimes.
India has made a significant impact on the retail payment systems in the country with various solutions with National Financial Switching (NFS) such as UPI, RuPay, BHIM, NACH, IMPS, FASTAG, BBPS, *99#, CTS & AePS. National Financial Switching (NFS) has established a strong and sustainable operational model with in-house capabilities whose services are on par with any global ATM network.
The government of India has created strong guidelines for all banks to have a robust grievance redressal mechanism to deal with the issues of the people associated with cyber fraud with predefined service level agreements.
Aadhaar enabled e-Payments (AeP):
Aadhaar Enabled Payment System allows people to carry out financial transactions by furnishing just their Aadhaar number and verifying it with the help of their fingerprint/iris scan. This was created to benefit the uneducated from the rural sector.
Any bank customer who has their Aadhaar as their identity can access their respective Aadhaar-enabled bank account and perform basic banking transactions such as (a) Cash Withdrawal. (b) Cash Deposit (c) Balance Enquiry. (d) Aadhaar to Aadhaar Fund Transfer. (e) Mini Statement. (f) eKYC and (g) Get mini statement through a Business Correspondent Agent (BC) or Customer Service Point (CSP).
Making UPI Transactions and Payments:
You can make a payment or transfer money from account to another for which you can use the UPI payment platform (Google Pay, Phone Pe, and Paytm) and you are not charged. You can also link your credit card to a UPI app and make payments and transactions via the UPI app. Your credit card details will be saved and you can enter your CVV and OTP to make payments. (a) Customers are not charged any fees for using credit cards via UPI but you have to pay minimum charges when you transfer money from credit card to bank account. (b) You can add your money to your UPI wallet using your credit card with no charges.
UPI instead of Visa and Master:
According to RBI, in 2021-22, there were a total of Rs 16.83 lakh crore worth of UPI transactions, as against Rs 7.3 lakh crore worth of debit card transactions and Rs 9.72 lakh crore worth of credit card transactions. Seeing this as a potential, RBI has announced its proposal to allow the linking credit cards on UPI platforms. RuPay will be the first to start this process.
Usually there is an MDR fee, “merchant discount rate,” a fee charged by banks to merchants for processing payments. If you had done shopping from Lifestyle and paid through your Visa credit card, then MDR would be charged from Lifestyle and that fee would be distributed to your bank, the bank where Lifestyle has its account, and Visa/Master as they are service providers. The core important point is that RuPay doesn’t have any merchant discount rate fee. RuPay only has a 20 % share of India’s card market. Once this is formally introduced, it will be a game changer in India since merchants will save merchant discount rate fee amounts.
What to do if you are scammed :
(a) Report the scam to your local Cyber Crime Police authorities or register a complaint on https://www.cybercrime.gov.in or alternatively dial the toll free number 1930 immediately. 1930 is operated by Citizen Financial Cyber Fraud Reporting and Management System , It is developed in-house by I4C to integrate Law Enforcement Agencies, Banks, and Financial Intermediaries on one platform.
(b) Dial 14448 Toll Free Number (or) Log on to the portal https://cms.rbi.org.in which is One Nation One Ombudsman Scheme and you can report all loss of money happened online via UPI Transfers.
(c) Alternatively you can also report at NPCI Portal – https://www.npci.org.in/what-we-do/upi/dispute-redressal-mechanism
