Rupay, India’s domestic debit and credit card payment network promoted aggressively by the Government, reported that it has surpassed 1 billion transactions through both offline and online modes in FY 2019. This year RuPay observed a 70% rise in transactions compared to FY 2018’s 667 million transactions.
Managed by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), RuPay has seen an excellent adoption rate amid continued push from the government since its launch in 2012. The payments network has collaborated with over 600 banks in the country and has ties with Discover Financial and JCB to enable its card schemes internationally.
“RuPay currently has 33% market share of card transactions. Today, there are over 1,100 banks issuing around 600 million RuPay cards, half of which are in the mid and premium segments,” Praveena Rai, COO of Rupay, told the Economic Times.
In March, RuPay reported a milestone of 64 million issuances of RuPay Global Cards. Under the Indian Government’s “One Nation, One Card” scheme, RuPay is getting a substantial boost in growing its reach. The same was expressed in RBI’s vision published earlier this year.
RuPay noted growth (in terms of value) at ₹1,17,400 crore ($16.9 billion) during FY19 as of May 2019. RuPay debit cards saw a growth of 32% in FY ’19 at 4.4 billion transactions compared to the previous year’s 3.3 billion transactions. Also, in terms of value, RuPay cards noted a rise of 80% in FY ’19.
“We have seen RuPay grow to almost 23% of total debit card transactions on our platform, against 17% over the last one year, which is an impressive jump,” Rajeev Agrawal, CEO of Innoviti Payments, told the ET.
“In some small towns with a population between 10 lakh and 25 lakh, the NPCI-run cards have also become number one in terms of usage on our platform,” Agrawal added.
Earlier this month, NPCI announced a collaboration with JCB to increase its operations in international markets. Under this collab, NCPI will be issuing RuPay JCB Global Cards which can be used at card-accepting points for RuPay in India and for JCB outside India.
RuPay cards account for 25% of the total card transactions in India. It has become a nightmare of sorts for global payment giants like Visa and Mastercard, as they are struggle to grow against such an aggressive, government-powered push. Both the companies are failing to register significant growth in what is one of the largest digital payments markets globally.
RuPay has had an advantage since the Government launched a financial inclusion program in 2014. Under this program, Indians opening a bank account for the first time were offered indigenous digital platform cards instead of MasterCard or Visa.
