An article in the Hindu Business Line highlights the impressive progress India has made in deploying the infrastructure of electronic payments. By measures such as POS terminals (rising from 12.1 million in 2015 to 45.9 million in 2019) and debit cards (604 million in 2015 to 835 million in 2019), great progress is being made.

Additionally, moving beyond just setting up full-fledgedbank branches, banks have started expanding the base of alternate electronicdelivery channels at a much faster pace, after mobile connectivity and network,and Internet services were made accessible and affordable to people at thebottom of the pyramid.

Despite impressive technical progress, the challenge ofgrowing the base of end-users is ultimately one of financial awareness andeducation:

In order to make FI work to ensure that the benefits of inclusion reaches the intended target group of the society, seminal changes need to be introduced in the spread of financial and digital literacy and credit counselling. While many stakeholders have been doing sporadic work, they are not coordinated enough to optimise its effectiveness.

Inadequate institutional efforts to disseminate financial awareness at the grassroots level are keeping even financially connected masses (those having bank accounts and debit cards) away from the formal financial system. Adequately equipping and empowering institutions engaged in disseminating comprehensive literacy programmes will be essential to unleash the potentiality of the huge financial and digital infrastructure built and designed to sub serve FI.

In rapidly emerging markets such as India, we often focus onthe last mile challenge of infrastructure deployment as a limiting growthfactor. However, as the article implies, the pace of deployment mayexceed the ability of target populations to become actual service consumerswithout concurrent, intensive user campaigns to build new generations ofelectronic payments users.

Overview byKen Paterson, VP, Special Projects andDirector, Customer Interaction at Mercator Advisory Group

Summary

Article Name

India Has Made Impressive Progress in Electronic Payments, But Growing the End-User Base Remains a Challenge

Description

An article in the Hindu BusinessLine highlights the impressive progress India has made in deploying the infrastructure of electronic payments. Despite impressive technical progress, the challenge of growing the base of end-users is ultimately one of financial awareness and education.

Author

Ken Paterson

Publisher Name

PaymentsJournal

Publisher Logo

Read the original post:

India Has Made Impressive Progress in ePayments, but Growing the End-User Base Remains a Challenge - PaymentsJournal