Spice Money
Neighbourhood ATMs vanishing? Smartphone-enabled Micro ATMs come to your rescue
Publication- The Financial Express
Edition- Online
Date- 27 June, 2019
From six ATMs a year ago in a part of a South Delhi colony, only a single machine has been able to survive as the Confederation of ATM Industry (CATMi) has decided to shut down nearly 50 per cent ATMs due to high maintenance cost of software and equipment upgrades. One can easily understand the load on that single ATM and what happens when it goes out of cash or out of order.
If this is the scenario in the Capital city and that too in South Delhi, it is not hard to imagine the problem the people of rural areas are facing due to the plummeting number of ATMs at the moment. Considering the quantum of crisis, Spice Money has taken up the pressing task of developing an alternate transactional framework.
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27 teams compete at Conduent Blockchain Hackathon
Publication- The Economic Times
Edition- Online
Date- 27 June, 2019
Conduent Inc, a digital interactions company, hosted the Conduent Blockchain Hackathon finale in Hyderabad last week, in collaboration with HackerEarth, an enterprise software talent management company. The first of the global hackathon series on blockchain which started in April 2019, received 1276 registrations from across India, said a release. Open to all blockchain enthusiasts in the country, the event’s first phase participants competed in a virtual crowdsourcing process over the course of six weeks. It then culminated into a 36-hour on-site hackathon where 76 participants forming 27 teams created and presented their blockchain solution prototypes.
The focus of the Hackathon was to build a viable, decentralized application to share assets in the business-to-business (B2B) and consumer-to-consumer (C2C) contexts around themes including incentive system for social behavioural change; Blockchain for a shared economy; smart properties; transparent interactions with the government and delegative voting systems. Participants could use any blockchain platform, technology stack, domain, or programming language of their choice. Applications were evaluated on the basis of their novelty and practicality, the released said.
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Local data storage ready, Whatsapp to open payments tap
Publication- The Economic Times
Edition- Online
Date- 27 June, 2019
WhatsApp has set up data storage facilities within India for its payments business, according to two people in the know, paving the way for a full fledged commercial launch of digital payment services by the Facebook-owned messaging app. The development marks a major milestone for the country’s banking regulator, which has been firm in its demand that global payments companies store transaction data pertaining to Indian users within the country. WhatsApp is expected to go live with its Unified Payments Interface-based service with ICICI Bank NSE 0.56 % and services through Axis Bank, HDFC Bank and SBI are likely to follow, said one person quoted above.
“WhatsApp has completed the necessary work on data localisation and has moved to the audit process. Once the auditors submit the report to the regulator, the company can go live with its payments application,” a source told ET. The Reserve Bank of India requires payments companies to first set up data storage facilities in India and then submit an audit report to the central bank. The audit has to be conducted only by auditors empaneled with the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team, CERT-IN.
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Payments data must be stored in systems located in India, says RBI
Publication- Business Standard
Edition- Online
Date- 27 June, 2019
The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has said all data related to payment transactions must be stored in the country and that such information, if processed abroad, will have to be brought back within 24 hours. “The entire payment data shall be stored in systems located only in India,” the RBI said in its frequently asked question (FAQ) section on Wednesday, responding to certain issues raised by payment system operators. “The data should be deleted from the systems abroad and brought back to India not later than one business day or 24 hours from the payment processing, whichever is earlier,” it added.
The clarification has come a week after the government said the RBI would examine concerns around its strict data-localisation guidelines. Payment providers have been lobbying at various levels for free flow of data across borders in order to ensure that customer benefits and fraud analysis are not affected.
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New UPI category waives MDR for small merchants
Publication- The Financial Express
Edition- Online
Date- 27 June, 2019
The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) has created a new category of Unified Payments Interface (UPI) transactions to enable small offline merchants to accept such payments without having to pay merchant discount rate (MDR). The P2PM category of payments will cater to small merchants and the unorganised retail sector. Merchants with expected inward UPI transactions worth up to Rs 50,000 per month will be eligible for acquisition under the P2PM category. The acquiring bank or fintech will not be allowed to charge MDR from merchants acquired as P2PM vendors.
Once the merchant is acquired, they will be allowed a cooling period of three months. If such a merchant clocks inward UPI payments of Rs 50,000 per month for three consecutive months, they will have to be formally acquired under the P2M category. This means that they will have to begin paying MDR. FE had first reported on January 16 that banks had suggested to the government that smaller vendors be on-boarded as peers, thereby sparing them the MDR. MDR is the fee charged by banks and fintechs for offering payment-acceptance infrastructure. The MDR for merchant UPI transactions stands at 0.25% for transactions under `1,000 and 0.65% for all other transactions.
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Airtel Payments Banks ranked as India’s number one bank: Report
Publication- The Times of India
Edition- Online
Date- 27 June, 2019
As per the recent report released by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) on digital transactions, Airtel Payments Bank has been ranked as the number one bank in India in terms of digital transactions target achievement in FY 18-19. In a summary of the performance of 56 banks in India, the results showed that Airtel Payments Bank ranked No. 1 and achieved 211.66% of its digital transactions target. It was followed by FINO Payments Bank and Paytm Payments Bank which overshot their targets by 209.31% and 122.95% respectively. The evaluation was done on several parameters, including the volume of transactions, the number of terminals for Aadhaar-based merchant payments deployed by them, and the average success rate of digital transactions.
The overall digital transactions of 211.6% done through Airtel Payments Bank include transactions made via UPI, Debit Card, Mobile Banking, Net Banking, Prepaid Card, PPI, NEFT among other methods. Recently, Airtel Payments Bank has also enabled BHIM UPI-based payments at over 500,000 merchant points across India, allowing consumers to make digital payments for goods and services by using any BHIM UPI-enabled bank or payments app over their mobile phones. Anubrata Biswas, MD & CEO – Airtel Payments Bank, said “We are delighted to be the no.1 Bank in India in terms of achieving the Digital Transactions target set by MEITY. This ranking reaffirms our focus on taking convenient digital banking services to the doorstep of every Indian. We will continue to make efforts towards sustaining this solid momentum and contribute to the Government’s vision of Digital India and financial inclusion.”
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