India's digital payments landscape saw a massive growth after demonetisation, and that springboard effect has carried on the momentum throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, thanks to the coming together of the new-age technology such as wallets and Unified Payments Interface (UPI), and mobile banking along with cheaper smartphones and data rate.
According to an ACI Worldwide report tracking and analysing real-time payment across 48 global markets, India retained the top spot with 25.5 billion real-time payments transactions.
India¡¯s total share of instant payments and other electronic payments stood at 15.6 per cent instant payments 22.9 per cent respectively in 2020. Cash payments still account for a considerable 61.4 per cent, but it has reduced significantly from nearly 83 per cent in 2018.
The report further estimated that by 2024 the share of real-time payments volume in overall electronic transactions will exceed 50 per cent, and will further touch 71.7 per cent by 2025.
According to RBI data, digital payments have grown at a compounded annual growth rate of 55.1 per cent between 2015-16 and 2019-20--from ?593.61 crore in the year to March 2016 to ?3,434.56 crore in the year to March 2020.
India¡¯s big digital payments bet, United Payments Interface or UPI, has meanwhile set a new record during the pandemic. According to data from National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), it crossed ?5 lakh crore in value in March 2021 across 2.30 billion transactions.
The report highlights that the fraud incidents associated with real-time payments were on the rise as fraudsters tend to target new channels. These include confidence tricks (13.7 per cent), Identity theft (11.6 per cent) and digital wallet account hacks (6.2 per cent).
Earlier this month, independent security researchers claimed that KYC data of 3.5 million users of India¡¯s fintech platform Mobikwik is available for purchase on the dark web. The leaked database has over 99 million mail, phone passwords, addresses and other details as well as 40 million 10-digit card numbers with month, year and card hash.
To give you an idea, cyber attacks have surged from 53,117 in 2017 to a staggering 11,58,208 in 2020. And this includes the data breach of India¡¯s popular grocery startup BigBasket in November and the Bangalore-based edutech startup Unacademy in May last year.
And with rising cybersecurity violations, the RBI looks to tighten its supervision requirements for payment firms that store consumer data.
ET reported that from April 1, all licensed payment system operators (PSOs) will have to submit detailed ¡°compliance certificates¡± to the central bank twice a year. This is in addition to the 2018 RBI norm, which mandates all PSOs to submit board-approved annual System Audit Report (SAR) by CERT-empanelled auditors.?