Visa Halts Its Single-Click Payment Feature For Online Transactions In India

Credit and debit cards major Visa has reportedly paused its single-click checkout service for online transactions in India, more than three years after launching the service in the country.

Visa voluntarily paused the service in the market, ET reported.

Visa launched its ‘Single Click’ feature as an extension to Contactless Payments in 2019, which was introduced in India for simple and seamless transactions at in-store POS machines.

The feature was applicable for buying goods online worth up to INR 2,000. For an online transaction, it did not require card verification value (CVV) or one-time password (OTP) to share.

It was launched during the festive season 2019, across leading ecommerce merchants. Back then, T.R. Ramachandran, former group country manager, Visa India and South Asia, said, “Thanks to the rapid growth of e-commerce, Indian e-commerce merchants are grappling with an ever-growing number of consumer issues such as cart abandonment, connectivity and incorrect passwords during the payment leg of their transaction.Built exclusively for these unique challenges in the Indian e-commerce market, Visa Safe Click helps eliminate these points of friction.”

While large ecommerce players such as food delivery platforms and others went live with this, payment aggregators such as Razorpay and Paytm also integrated this service for select Visa cardholders.

Currently, Visa is working on an evolved form of network authentication product under RBI guidelines, the company said.

Back in 2016, RBI relaxed norms for additional factor of authentication (AFA) for payments up to INR 2,000 for online card not present (CNP) transactions. However, the central bank was not happy with this kind of transaction and decided to put a pause to this.

Debit cards, credit cards constitute a significant share of the payment instruments available in India for merchant payments. India is heavily a debit card market as seen from the number of such cards issued – about 92 Cr, as of May 31, 2022.

Last year, the new rules for the card tokenisation norms also came into effect. Simply put, card tokenisation is the process where actual card details are replaced with an alternate code, called a token. Under the RBI’s guidelines for tokenisation and card storage, payment aggregators, merchants and payment gateways will have to purge the customers’ card data stored with them.

While Visa has positioned its contactless payments as a convenient and simple solution for mass consumers, the question arises if the discontinuity may impact the small-ticket transactions. However, consumers have other easy payment options such as UPI for small ticket transactions. But it is important to note that ecommerce accounted for over 63% of credit card expenditure, or little more than INR 86,000 Cr in March 2023, as per RBI data. Hence, the online players could see some amount of impact initially.