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Digital Payment Mission to boost mobile banking

Mission will start operations next week
Last Updated 22 April 2017, 17:35 IST

 National Digital Payment Mission, the entity mooted by the government to promote digital payment in the last Budget, will start operations on Monday, said Electronics and IT secretary Aruna Sundararajan on Saturday.

Interacting with DH, Aruna said National Digital Payment Mission is the government’s priority to make the payment seamless via BHIM app across the country.

“The IT secretary will lead the Payment Mission, and it will be basically driving the digitisation target set by the Finance Ministry in the last Budget,” said Aruna.

She said the government is planning to increase digital transaction volume by 25,000 crore by the end of this year. “We are aiming to achieve eight times growth compared with that of the last year’s Rs 300 crore to 400 crore,” she said.

As the government is finding it difficult to set up point of sale (PoS) machines for digital payment, the Electronics and IT secretary said enabling mobile payment is the best way.

“The government has already developed the application BHIM for the mobile payment. Besides  Android and iOS app for smart phone users, Prime Minister Narendra Modi also deployed BHIM USSD (Unstructured Supplementary Service Data platform for feature phone via *99# service),” she said.

BHIM, BHIM Aadhaar and Bharat QR Code will also help the country leapfrog two generations of technology. “It will take away the credit card and debit card payment structure stright to mobile banking in the country,” she said.

BHIM Aadhaar connection will help 99.9% Indians to transact via their biometric authentication across the country. “We have brought 25 crore people straight to mobile banking in the last three months, which is an unique global achievement,” she said.

Aruna also said the digital payment acceptance infrastructure is seamlessly built across the country.
“The fact is not only big merchants but also smaller merchants can engage in the transaction process along with citizens. Every category of citizen and merchants can participate in the mobile banking and it is a big change post demonetisation,” she said.

She also said the country has now 3.5 million PoS machines within three months starting from January and 72.5 lakh merchants are included in the system in the last 13 days.

“By making these massive platform, the government is trying to bring down Merchant Discount Rate (MDR) for each transaction,” she said.

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(Published 22 April 2017, 17:35 IST)

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