BackBharatQR to go live on IRCTC website in a month
While Visa is already on board, talks are on with MasterCard and RuPay to enable BharatQR on the IRCTC website
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New Delhi: BharatQR is expected to go live on the Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) website within a month.
IRCTC is a public sector company that comes under the ministry of railways.
BharatQR is a common QR code jointly developed by all the four major card payment companies—National Payments Corp. of India that runs RuPay cards, MasterCard, Visa and American Express—under the Reserve Bank of India (RBI).
“In the coming few weeks, BharatQR will go live on IRCTC website. We are in talks with MasterCard and RuPay for this. Visa is already on board with us and mVisa ‘scan and pay’ option is available on the website," said Dewang Neralla, chief executive officer, Atom Technologies Ltd, a payment service provider facilitating QR-based payments for IRCTC.
Currently, mVisa ‘scan and pay’ option is available on IRCTC payment page. mVisa is a QR code-based payment facility for Visa cardholders only.
“When you go to IRCTC website there is an option to scan and pay. Once this option is selected, the customer will be required to enter the mobile number and email-id after which a QR code will be generated on the screen. The customer has to just scan the QR code using a certified bank app and select the ‘pay’ option," he added.
“For consumers, who use bank apps like HDFC Payzapp or ICICI Pockets, it becomes very easy to just scan the QR code and make payments rather than entering the PIN number or even the amount."
With BharatQR going live soon, there will be more banking apps which will be able to process QR-based transactions.
More than 15 banks are fully integrated with BharatQR, including Axis Bank, Bank of Baroda, Kotak Mahindra Bank, HDFC Bank Ltd and ICICI Bank Ltd.
“It is a major revolutionary step because of interoperability. There will be one common QR code platform whether the payment is through MasterCard, Visa or RuPay .This will result in making payment experience much simpler and easier for consumers," said Neralla.
In an attempt to popularize the use of QR-based payments, IRCTC and Visa have introduced a special offer for customers using mVisa (Scan & Pay) option on the IRCTC payment page which entails a discount of up to Rs50 for payments made between 5 May and 4 September.
“The scan and pay feature is been taken care by Atom Technologies. Currently, only mVisa is live but they are working on BharatQR which will go live eventually," said Sandip Dutta, the public relations officer of IRCTC.
According to a report by IRCTC, the average daily sale of train tickets through the IRCTC portal, which is the world’s second busiest with more than 3 crore registered users, is around 5.5-6 lakh. It has registered a record 14,904 tickets per minute.
IRCTC offers a plethora of tourism-related services apart from train ticket booking such as flight and cab/bus booking and hotel or lounge bookings.
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