ONE-ON-ONE A P Hota | MD & CEO, NPCI ‘Aadhaar, chip & pin need to coexist’ NPCI MD & CEO A P Hota Says Both Systems Required For Authentication Mayur Shetty TNN Mumbai: The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) is emerging as the infrastructure provider for the banking system. Its entry has enabled bank accountholders free usage of any ATM in the country. Its Rupay card promises to save the country foreign exchange paid out to multinational giants as service charges for card payments. It is also providing the technology backbone for direct cash transfer which will replace government subsidies. In an interview with TOI, NPCI MD & CEO A P Hota speaks of how the payment landscape will evolve. What is the progress on Rupay—India’s domestic card payment system? How does it compare with China Union Pay? Our main achievement is that we are “cardifying” customers of those banks who have never seen a card. Until Rupay came hardly 50-60 banks were issuing cards. Now the number of banks issuing cards is 106. We plan to reach out to 500 to 600 banks in a year for issuance of cards. Out of 58 rural banks, 50 have started issuing Rupay cards which can be used in any ATM or for retail payments and ecommerce. Where will the cards be accepted? Of the 9 lakh point of sales (POS) terminals, 2.10 lakh are active on Rupay. Three banks—HDFC Bank, ICICI Merchant Services and Axis Bank—account for 80% of POS terminals in the country. We are talking to all three. We expect that 90% of the terminals would be active by September-end. Among public sector banks, SBI is the largest and we have already activated 85,000 of their POS machines. In e-commerce, we have made a beginning by tying up two banks out of 17. We are targeting the remaining. There are about 12,000 merchants in online space and we are working to get them to accept Rupay. Merchants will have to make a small change of providing one more link to Rupay payments. There has been some hype over the 1.4 million Aadhaar-based micro ATMs? Who will set them up? This 1.4 million number has been arrived at by calculating two terminals per village for each of the six lakh villages in the country and remaining two lakhs for the cities. The micro ATMs are similar to point of sales terminals with biometric authentication. Under the UIDAI scheme, banks would be reimbursed cost of the terminals to the extent of Rs 15,000 the moment they reach 2000 transactions. The financial support is linked with the volume of transactions. Nabard has said that it will provide Rs 25,000 per terminal if they are set up by rural banks. Regional rural banks (RRBs) are dependent on sponsor public sector banks. This gives an opportunity to PSU banks to leverage RRBs to reach out to rural areas for financial inclusion. There seems to be some debate over whether cards should have chip-and-pin based authentication or Aadhaar-based biometric authentication? It is not debate between Aadhaar and chip and pin. The market is very large and the potential of Aadhaar is in taking needs of another segment. If everyone has to move to cashless transaction in a secure mode that will need the coexistence of both. As against average cost of Rs 20 for a magnetic stripe card, the cost is around Rs 80 for a chip card. For financial inclusion, Aadhar is a better option because in villages maintaining the confidentiality of PIN is difficult as this would require a certain degree of understanding of the risk associated with it. There have been a number of frauds in ATMs of late. As their network provider what are you doing to cut frauds? We are asking banks to go in for fraud-risk mitigation (FRM) system. FRM system is a neural system that can identify suspect transactions. RBI has also recommended that banks should put in closed circuit cameras in all ATM locations. But because cloning has become so easy, sooner or later the country will have to migrate to a chip and pin or Aadhar based authentication. There are over 5 crore accountholders registered for IMPS (instant mobile-based payment service). When will the usage take off? If IMPS has to cover everybody it is possible only if usage goes beyond those with smartphones. It needs to cover Rs 1,000 handsets as well. For such handsets, the only option is SMS or USSD. But SMS is unsecure as the PIN is exposed so the best system is a server-based one. So USSD is the answer. But this requires partnership with telecom companies. The telcos want bank to pay charges on behalf of customers, but if banks do this tomorrow there may be a demand from customers that bank pay data charges for mobile and internet.
Posted on: Tue, 02 Jul 2013 23:52:29 +0000
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