Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation Limited (IRCTC) has now added an option to its website to allow international travellers to book tickets through international credit and debit cards issued outside the country.
Atom, an online and mobile payments platform has worked with IRCTC to offer acceptance of international credit and debit cards on IRCTC ticketing platform. The service was unveiled jointly by IRCTC, Visa and Atom, in New Delhi today.
Atom Technologies Limited is a payment service providers offering its services across POS, IVR, Internet, Mobile. It offers its payment services across 30000+ merchants and processes over $3 Bn annually.
Commenting on the development, A.K. Manocha, chairman and managing director of IRCTC, said, “Atom has deployed a robust technology and was class from protection mechanism and our technology team has made necessary changes along with them to enable such transactions.”
IRCTC manages the complete domestic ticket bookings for Indian Railways, provides airline bookings, hotel bookings as well as other ancillary services for the passengers.
One of the key issues faced by international passengers is their inability to make payment for domestic booking on IRCTC using their International credit or debit card.
The website is estimated to be selling about 1.5 Lakh tickets every day. There are 3 lakh users that transact on the website per day, and over 15,000 tickets are sold every minute.
Process to Pay through International cards:
- Select ‘International cards power by Atom’ payment option present under ‘Payment Gateway/credit card’ category at payment page
- Input all the mandatory details for payment at the database such as card number, name, expiry, CVV, Bank name, mobile number, and address, etc.
- After submission of all the details but it will be booked in case of successful payment response received from the bank/ Payment Gateway
The facility is estimated to benefit 3.56 lakh registered international users who want to book e-tickets for themselves or their family members.
For the service Atom will charge 4% of transaction value as payment gateway charge for uses of international credit or debit cards through its payment gateway.
Explaining the technology at the backend, Dewang Neralla, CEO, ATOM said, “We are thankful to the team at IRCTC to choose ATOM for their global ticketing window. Our platform is a highly scalable and adhering to the latest industry standards in the payments industry and we are sure we would be able to match up to IRCTC’s high technology standards. We have also signed up and integrated our platform with one of the best Risk Management platform globally, Decision Manager from Cybersource, which would enable to manage risk and fraud pro-actively.”
Atom will be now be deploying the technology to enable online transactions from International customers across Indian ecommerce sites offering goods and services to foreigners and NRIs.
Just yesterday, reports surfaced that 1 Cr IRCTC user data was feared to have been leaked from the website’s server. However, IRCTC Chairman & Managing Director A.K. Manocha, stated that there was no hacking activity. He further added, “The data screenshot shared by people does not match with the IRCTC data. Only a minute part of the data matches.” He also added that the number highlighted i.e 1 crore is incorrect, as, only a few lakh passengers have their PAN cards data saved on the website. As far as Credit cards details are concerned, he said, as IRCTC uses payment gateway for transactions, thus, this data is not stored on the platform.
He added, “We have several layers of protection on the website to prevent any such hacking.”
