Home
Internet
Internet News
RBI Forms Panel to Deepen Digital Payments, Led by Infosys' Nilekani

RBI Forms Panel to Deepen Digital Payments, Led by Infosys' Nilekani

By Reuters | Updated: 9 January 2019 10:32 IST

Highlights

The five-member panel will identify ways to widen financial inclusion
Panel will suggest measures to strengthen security of digital payments
In 2017-18, card payments in India rose 43 percent from the previous year

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) on Tuesday said it has constituted a panel with Infosys chairman Nandan Nilekani as its head in a bid to deepen digital payments in Asia's third-biggest economy.

The five-member panel, which includes a former deputy governor of the RBI, will identify ways to widen financial inclusion via the use of digital payments and suggest measures to "strengthen the safety and security of digital payments", the central bank said in a statement.

In 2017-18, card payments in India rose 43 percent from the previous year to Rs. 10.61 trillion ($151.21 billion), while payments through state-backed unified payments interface rose 16 times year-on-year to Rs. 1.01 trillion, according to RBI data released in August.

India's digital payments are expected to grow five-fold to $1 trillion by 2023, according to Credit Suisse.

Nilekani, a co-founder of India's second-biggest software services firm Infosys, was also the first chairman of a body that oversees India's ambitious biometric ID project, Aadhaar.

The RBI, in a rare public move last year, objected to a government-led panel's recommendation for payments systems to be overseen by a regulator that would be set up outside the central bank's control.

The RBI on Tuesday also issued guidelines on the use of tokenisation - a way to mask sensitive card data with unique symbols or elements - to make contactless card payments safer.

Comments

For the latest tech news and reviews, follow Gadgets 360 on X, Facebook, WhatsApp, Threads and Google News. For the latest videos on gadgets and tech, subscribe to our YouTube channel. If you want to know everything about top influencers, follow our in-house Who'sThat360 on Instagram and YouTube.