Number of swipe machines up 10 lakh since November 8
MUMBAI: The number of shops accepting card payments has jumped from 15 lakh to 25 lakh with banks adding over 10 lakh point of sale (PoS) terminals since demonetisation on November 8, 2016.
According to SBI, given the level of digitisation, the requirement of currency notes in the economy will come down by over Rs 1 lakh crore.
Prior to demonetisation, there were 15.1 lakh credit card swipe machines as of October 2016. This number jumped to 22.2 lakh in February this year and, according to an official of the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), the number has already crossed 25 lakh since then.
Half of the additions have come from SBI, Axis, HDFC Bank, Corporation Bank and ICICI Bank.
SBI has added 1.24 lakh machines in four months and HDFC Bank and Axis Bank have added 1.18 lakh each. Corporation Bank has added 80,822 and ICICI Bank has seen its network grow by 67,000.
According to Soumya Kanti Ghosh, chief economist, SBI, around Rs 1.17 lakh crore worth of notes need not be printed given the scale of shift to cards.
This will bring down cost of printing in the range of Rs 500-1,000 crore. "Recent data on digital payments published by the RBI indicates sharp growth in digital payments.
This includes setting up 5,476 PoS machines a day after demonetisation, jump in debit card usage and 36% increase in mobile banking transactions," said Ghosh.
Egged on by the government, banks have finalised plans to add another 30 lakh shops to the electronic payment network by September 2018. This includes 10 lakh additional PoS machines, 10 lakh Aadhaar-enabled payment facilities and another 10 lakh outlets accepting payment via QR code.
In some cases, while banks are lending their names to merchant acquisition network, the investment is being done by third-party processors.
Last week, payment company MobiSwipe said that it will add 50,000 mPoS devices in 2017. An mPoS terminal enables payments through a smartphone or tablet loaded with an app connected to the pocket-sized card reader.
"We have already received a demand for around 20,000-plus MobiSwipe mPoS devices over the last few months of commencing operations and are hopeful of supplying these within the following two months.
We aim to set up at least 1,00,000 of our PoS terminals by year-end," said Niranj Sangal, group CEO, OMA Emirates Group, which owns MobiSwipe.
ItzCash, another digital payments company, has developed a PoS terminal and it plans to deploy a lakh machines shortly.
According to SBI, given the level of digitisation, the requirement of currency notes in the economy will come down by over Rs 1 lakh crore.
Prior to demonetisation, there were 15.1 lakh credit card swipe machines as of October 2016. This number jumped to 22.2 lakh in February this year and, according to an official of the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), the number has already crossed 25 lakh since then.
Half of the additions have come from SBI, Axis, HDFC Bank, Corporation Bank and ICICI Bank.
SBI has added 1.24 lakh machines in four months and HDFC Bank and Axis Bank have added 1.18 lakh each. Corporation Bank has added 80,822 and ICICI Bank has seen its network grow by 67,000.
According to Soumya Kanti Ghosh, chief economist, SBI, around Rs 1.17 lakh crore worth of notes need not be printed given the scale of shift to cards.
This will bring down cost of printing in the range of Rs 500-1,000 crore. "Recent data on digital payments published by the RBI indicates sharp growth in digital payments.
This includes setting up 5,476 PoS machines a day after demonetisation, jump in debit card usage and 36% increase in mobile banking transactions," said Ghosh.
Egged on by the government, banks have finalised plans to add another 30 lakh shops to the electronic payment network by September 2018. This includes 10 lakh additional PoS machines, 10 lakh Aadhaar-enabled payment facilities and another 10 lakh outlets accepting payment via QR code.
In some cases, while banks are lending their names to merchant acquisition network, the investment is being done by third-party processors.
Last week, payment company MobiSwipe said that it will add 50,000 mPoS devices in 2017. An mPoS terminal enables payments through a smartphone or tablet loaded with an app connected to the pocket-sized card reader.
"We have already received a demand for around 20,000-plus MobiSwipe mPoS devices over the last few months of commencing operations and are hopeful of supplying these within the following two months.
We aim to set up at least 1,00,000 of our PoS terminals by year-end," said Niranj Sangal, group CEO, OMA Emirates Group, which owns MobiSwipe.
ItzCash, another digital payments company, has developed a PoS terminal and it plans to deploy a lakh machines shortly.
