RBI looking at guidelines on e-commerce: Khan

RBI Deputy Governor HR Khan on Wednesday said the Reserve Bank has some concerns on e-commerce transactions and will be coming out with some guidelines on the same.

“There are some issues which we are trying to look at. E-commerce is innovative and we cannot push away, so we will see.... we are looking at coming out with some guidelines on it,” Khan told reporters on the sidelines of an NPCI event here.

He, however, did not elaborate what the specific concerns of the regulator are.
In August, the RBI had found that US-based taxi aggregator Uber was flouting payments norms and had asked it to comply by October 31, for which the company has sought more time.

Uber was following its practice that falls short on the two-step user authentication norms as laid out by RBI.

The concerns voiced by the senior RBI official come within days of commerce minister Nirmala Sitharaman saying that her department was “watching” the developments in the fledgling space including some cases involving e-commerce majors in the courts over the market model.

It also comes after traditional brick and mortar traders approached the fair trade watch dog CII in this regard.

Khan said the RBI will come out with final guidelines on trade receivables discounting system, a draft of which was issued in July.

“We expect it is going to be a big gamechanger for the receivables of small and medium industry. We are going to put the guidelines and the application will be invited to middle of February,” he added.

Under the guidelines, both factoring and reverse factoring will be allowed, he said. On the foreign investors' caps in government securities, Khan said the increase will come about but in a phased manner.

When asked about the Budget announcement of bond buybacks to extend the maturity and reduce repayment burdens, Khan did not give an exact timeline or quantum of the mop-up and limited to saying that it will be done by March 2015.