National Payments Corporation to launch RuPay credit cards by June

 National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), an umbrella organisation for all retail payments system in India, plans entry into the RuPay credit cards segment by June 2016, according to its chairman M Balachandran.

“By June-July, we will roll out RuPay credit cards,” Balachandran said.
NPCI was set up with the guidance and support of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), and the Indian Banks’ Association (IBA) was incorporated in 2008. Launched in March 2012, RuPay currently has over 241 million customers, and handles 20 per cent of transactions in the country.

“In a short period of three years, NPCI has partnered with over 600 banks to issue RuPay cards, when compared with international banks,” Balachandran said.

Balachandran was in the City, to launch Unified Payments Interface (UPI) Hackathon, in association with Indian Software Product Industry Round Table (iSPIRT), which provided a platform for startups and developers community to accelerate innovations in payments arena. Over 300 participants comprising of technical teams of banks, payments banks and payment solution developers are participating in the event.

The hackathon will be conducted in multiple tracks primarily for two categories — software-based problem-solving — online or onsite event version and workshop format to solve a real-life problem that is plaguing the industry.

Participants shall use the API provided in the sandbox (set of rules that programmers need to use) to develop products/services to generate multiple solution options for each of the perspectives. An eminent panel of jury from iSPIRT and NPCI will evaluate the submissions.

UPI is the next generation payment system and it has the potential to revolutionise retail payments in India. A key feature of UPI is that it would provide interoperable and instant payments driven over the mobile platform. Besides, a customer will be able to make payments by providing just a single identifier like Aadhaar number or a virtual address.