NPCI Ties Up With Turkish Fintech To Drive Contactless Payments In Indian Shops

The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) has partnered with a Turkish global payment solutions company PayCore as a certified partner for RuPay SoftPOS to promote contactless payments across the country.

“This solution can be integrated into bank or aggregator acquiring systems to enable acquiring of RuPay using mobile phones enabled with NFC (near field communication-enabled) capability or add-ons,” NPCI stated in a press note on Monday.

RuPay is an Indian multinational financial services and payment service system, conceived and launched by the NPCI in 2012. It was created to fulfil the Reserve Bank of India’s vision of establishing a domestic, open and multilateral system of payments.

Using the RuPay SOftPoS system, the merchants will be able to accept the contactless payments of up to INR 5,000 by a simple tap and pay mechanism using their smartphones. This system will be providing a cost-effective acceptance to the infrastructure for the retailers at a nominal cost. This will also help proliferate the acceptance of digital payments in millions of underserved Indian MSMEs. Under the mechanism, the merchants will be able to convert their android smartphone devices into payment terminals simply by downloading the supported app.

RuPay has been endorsed by the Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, as transaction fees earned through the homegrown card network will “help in building roads, schools and hospitals for the poor.”

Giri Kumar Nair, MD & CEO SBI Payments said, “SBI Payments is working closely with NPCI to support the Government’s Digital India initiative enabling small and medium merchants in semi-urban and rural centres. We are also enabling NCMC cards on our terminals to improve consumer experience and the RBI announcement allowing upto INR 5,000 transactions through tap and go facility has further enhanced our ability to reach out to a wider number of merchant categories.”

This development may be a watershed moment for the Government of India’s Digital India initiative as it can provide a shift among merchants who deal in cash towards accepting a secure, contactless and digital payment option.

Ali Kancal, CEO of PayCore, has asserted that through this association the investment costs required by banks to reach over 63 million micro, small, and medium-sized businesses will be significantly reduced.

In July 2020, NPCI had launched the RuPay business credit card. The corporate credit card offered a 30-day credit period on business purchases, bill payments, travel expenses, automated GST, rental payments, payments to suppliers and online purchase of software to SMEs and startups. 

PayCore has been operational in India. SBI Payment, the payment solutions company of the State Bank of India, and Hitachi Payment both use PayCore’s SoftPOS technology.

To manage the rising flow of digital payments, NPCI is now looking to revamp its technology infrastructure for all its payment channels, including Unified Payments Interface (UPI), Immediate Payment Service (IMPS), Aadhaar-enabled Payment System (AePS) and National Automated Clearing House (NACH). The NPCI is looking to upgrade these systems and complete migration by the end of 2021 as it expects to process over a billion transactions per day.