Spice Money: Industry Monitoring 16 May 2019
- Priyanka Kanodia
- May 20, 2019
- 4 min read
Spice Money
Spice Money achieves Gross Transactional Value of INR 2400 crore in April exclusively
Publication- BW CIO
Edition- Online
Date- 16 May, 2019
Spice Money, a business unit of Spice Digital and one of India’s largest tech-enabled Hyper Local Payments Network, recently achieved a feat of carrying out 12 million transactions within the month of April. The transactions generated a massive Gross Transactional Value of INR 2400 crore, firmly establishing Spice Money as a preferred platform to carry out financial transactions for the unserved and underserved population in the country. Spice Money has introduced new product offerings and enriched existing ones to further its goal of extending digitized transactional benefits to a large section of people who have little access to conventional financial facilities.
Spice Money, in addition to its Aadhaar Based payment system, has added a Mini-ATM feature that enables users to carry out debit-card based transactions. It helps to circumvent a few problems which might crop up during Aadhaar based transactions, such as biometric mismatch, data error, etc. The move is expected to serve the elder population significantly, who often complain of hassles during fingerprint based Aadhaar transactions, which might change due to age. Additionally, Debit-card based transactions allow for a higher withdrawal limit, thereby enhancing the scope of the transactions that can be completed.
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Competitors
Industry News
Nasscom, Fintech want crypto in RBI’s sandbox
Publication- The Economic Times
Edition- Online
Date- 16 May, 2019
Technology industry lobby groups and founders of startups have asked India’s banking regulator to include cryptocurrencyand crypto assets in its proposed regulatory sandbox framework for the fintech industry. The Reserve Bank of India’s ‘Draft Enabling Framework for Regulatory Sandbox’, put out on April 18, had excluded cryptocurrency, initial coin offerings, credit registry and other related sectors. The regulator had invited comments from stakeholders on the guidelines by May 8. Distributed ledger, the technology on which cryptocurrency and blockchain is based, is considered the future of finance, but applications under blockchain technologies have been included for testing under the proposed framework.
“Since cryptocoins and tokens are an important component of the blockchain technology, the draft regulations appear to exclude testing of smart contracts and other approved blockchain technology under the sandbox,” said IT industry trade body Nasscom. “The decision to keep cryptocurrencies, trading of cryptocurrencies and initial coin offerings out of the purview of the regulatory sandbox is still not clear.”
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Value of UPI transactions beat cards in first three months of Q4: NPCI
Publication- Business Standard
Edition- Online
Date- 16 May, 2019
The Unified Payments Interface (UPI) has surpassed debit and credit cards in terms of transactions. The aggregate volume of transactions through the UPI - the government’s flagship payments platform - has crossed that of credit and debit card transactions in January 2019. The value of UPI transactions remained higher in the first three months of 2019, shows data by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) and Reserve Bank of India (RBI).
UPI has seen exponential growth between March 2018 and March 2019 with monthly transaction volumes growing 4.5 times to 799.54 million over the past one year.
In January this year, the number of UPI transactions stood at Rs 1.09 trillion, a little more than Rs 1.05 trillion worth of transactions recorded by the cards. In February, the number of UPI transactions stood at Rs 1.07 trillion and the amount transacted through cards was Rs 93,998 crore. In its initial days, a major chunk of UPI transactions were peer-to-peer (P2P) transactions and gradually, it has started to impact the person-to-merchant (P2M) segment also.
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UPI vs plastic money: Banks don’t want to set up ATMs due to low rural card-usage
Publication- The Financial Express
Edition- Online
Date- 16 May, 2019
The government has reportedly pulled up banks for not putting in place enough point of sales (PoS) terminals for credit and debit cards. Against a target of 2 million machines—mobile and physical—banks appear to have installed some 6.5 lakh machines. That’s not surprising because installing PoS machines can be an expensive proposition. And while banks may want the millions of RuPay cards they have issued to be used, there is the cost of running and maintaining the machines. The government’s dissatisfaction over the small number of machines placed in rural areas is misplaced given the usage in rural India is very low.
Indeed, it is unfair on the part of the government to impose targets without assessing the costs and subsidising the effort. That apart, the MDR (merchant discount rate) is also an issue; vendors are unwilling to bear the cost and are unable to pass on the costs to customers. The government also needs to accept that cash transactions remain tremendously popular. Much of the enthusiasm seen post-demonetisation seems to have been lost, partly because GST rates are too high.
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Altcoins Set to Challenge Bitcoin's Cryptocurrency Dominance with Steady Rise
Publication- News 18
Edition- Online
Date- 16 May, 2019
Bitcoin’s weathered hacks, heists, booms and busts to reign as the king of cryptocurrencies through its first decade. But now there’s a fresh challenge to its dominance of the fledgling market: some 2,000 smaller digital coins. Collectively, “altcoins” are gaining ground on their bigger cousin. Individually, they are gaining traction among users, gathering communities of developers and users often deeply devoted to their goals.
Bitcoin now accounts for around 60% of the $240 billion crypto market, down from nearly 90% just over two years ago. That fading dominance reflects tough times for the original cryptocurrency since its late 2017 apex. Bitcoin has almost doubled in value this year, rallying nearly 30% in recent days to touch its highest level in ten months on Tuesday. But last year it lost three-quarters of its value. That volatility has put off mainstream investors from pension funds to asset managers who are seen as crucial to bitcoin’s growth from speculative token to established asset.
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