Credit and debit card major Visa has discontinued its single-click checkout service for online transactions in India. The company started offering the services in 2019 across the country. The card major voluntarily paused the service in the market
Visa launched its ‘Single Click’ feature, in India, for simple and seamless transactions at in-store POS machines as an extension to Contactless Payments in 2019.
The feature was applicable for buying goods online worth up to Rs 2,000. It did not require card verification value (CVV) or one-time password (OTP) to complete the transaction.
Visa is currently working on an advanced type of network authentication solution in accordance with RBI criteria. In 2016, the RBI eased the requirements for additional factor of authentication (AFA) for online card not present (CNP) transactions up to Rs 2,000. However, the central bank was not pleased with this type of transaction and chose to halt it.
Debit and credit cards constitute a large share of the payment instruments available for commercial payments in India. As of May 31, 2022, the number of debit cards issued in India is expected to exceed 92 million.
Last year, the new card tokenisation requirements were also adopted. Card tokenisation is simply the process of substituting actual card details with an alternate code known as a token. Under the RBI's tokenisation and card storage guidelines, payment aggregators, merchants, and payment gateways will be compelled to destroy client card data kept with them.
While Visa has positioned contactless payments as a convenient and straightforward solution for mass customers, the question remains if the discontinuity will have an impact on small-ticket transactions. However, for small ticket transactions, consumers have other simple payment options, such as UPI. However, according to RBI data, ecommerce accounted for more over 63 per cent of credit card expenditure, or little more than Rs 86,000 crore in March 2023. As a result, the online players may experience some influence at first.