Digital transactions shoot up post demonetisation

Mumbai: Digital payment companies have seen a substantial jump in their business as a result of the government’s measures towards promoting cashless transactions post demonetisation last year. These firms are likely to further consolidate their business with more incentives for digital transactions.

“In the last 12 months, we saw over 3 times growth. Before demonetisation, we were processing monthly transactions of Rs3,000 crore, which now stands at Rs6,800 crore across all our verticals,” Atom Technologies managing director and CEO Dewang Neralla said.

The major contributor to this growth was online payments business, he indicated. “Our focus has been largely on the education, travel ticketing financial services, C2G payments and cable and wireless industries and we have seen all round growth both in terms of enrolments as well as transactions.

“Payment processing volumes have grown three times to what they were since demonetisation and we still continue to see a healthy growth of around 20% on a month-on-month basis in transactions in our online payment gateway,” he said.

The company is targeting to bring into fold over 10 lakh merchants over the next few months, it said. Globally, this is seen as an exciting time for fintech, especially payment processing.

According to the Payments Council of India, the growth rate of the digital payments industry, which was earlier in the range of 20-50%, has accelerated post demonetisation to 40-70%.

“However, demonetisation is just one of the milestones towards our country’s cashless journey and not the final destination. It conveyed a strong psychological message to our countrymen that cash is not welcome and digitisation of cash is inevitable. This also resulted in doubling of the number of PoS machines in just one year...,” Payments Council of India chairman Navin Surya pointed out.

However, he said, for further accelerating this growth momentum and moving towards a less cash economy, both the government and regulators need to continue efforts. “...seamless access to payments network and other critical payments infrastructure like UPI and RTGS, among others ...will make sure that incentives continue to grow for digital transactions. These critical steps can drive our current industry growth of 10% transactions to 50% in the next 5 years,” he added.

According to Bhavik Vasa – chief growth officer, EbixCash, post-demonetisation, the rhetoric has now changed from bank versus non-bank or wallet versus bank, with the industry witnessing an increased mind share for its digital and cashless journey.

“At Ebix ItzCash we now have more than 2 lakh retail touch points across the country, our ability to be an omni-channel player, has helped us clock a growth of 35-40% across sectors,” Vasa said.

Most digital players in the industry have made multi-fold investments in the sector in the last one year in infra, brand, marketing, creating awareness. Ebix Inc CEO Robin Raina has further committed $200 million fund for investments and growth in India.