Friday, August 6, 2010

IndiaPay-An alternative in the making for Visa and Mastercard

I have always been a fan of "Made in India" tags on products, processes and services that aim to compete with global players. I think the discourse on globalisation restricts India's role as a "market". A market where you can sell, with relative ease, shoddy products and services. Given the pent up demand among the 250 million odd middle class, one can literally get away by selling anything.
Hence when I read about a RBI backed payment processing platform called IndiaPay, it made me happy. Visa and Mastercard are payment processing platforms. As more and more Indians start using plastic money, the payment processing platforms will stand to make a lot of money.Today, nine out of ten card transactions are undertaken by Visa and Mastercard. A new player in the space may just drive down costs.
Also as more and more farmers are covered under the Kisan Credit Card,IndiaPay assumes that much more importance.
While Malaysia and China developed their own payment processing platforms in 1997 and 2002 respectively, India Pay will take another two years to hit the markets.

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