New Delhi: The United Arab Emirates (UAE) is set to issue RuPay cards as early as next week, as India continues to expand its home-grown card payment network. This will mark RuPay’s third international debut in 2019, following Bhutan and Singapore.
As many as 12 major businesses in UAE will start accepting RuPay card from next week, Khaleej Times reported. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who is on a two-day visit to Abu Dhabi, was present at the launch of RuPay card on Saturday.
RuPay was launched by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI)-backed National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI). In India, the seven-year old card scheme directly competes with global payments network behemoths, primarily MasterCard and Visa.
RuPay has limited international presence as of now, even as it has tied up with several global payment networks so that customers can make payments and access cash while travelling abroad.
People travelling overseas generally shy away from RuPay cards due to lack of awareness and brand appeal, along with higher acceptance of other global payment networks. Towards this, the banking regulator plans to widen the scope of usage of RuPay globally to boost the brand.
Recently, an expert committee report on digital payments headed by Nandan Nilekani recommended that NPCI should put an internationalization plan for Indian payments systems such as RuPay and instant payment system BHIM Unified Payments Interface (UPI). This would ease remittances into India and help Indian travellers make payments abroad, the report said.
“The committee recommends that some of these systems, such as BHIM UPI and RuPay be allowed to be used in other countries, so that the systems in India are ready to compete with the best in the world,” it said.
RuPay was devised to promote the use of electronic payments, besides giving push to the idea of financial inclusion.
Modi’s flagship scheme to provide affordable basic banking services--Jan Dhan Yojana--gave impetus to the payment scheme. It is moving towards capturing the lion's share of the market in terms of payments done through debit and credit cards. Besides, RuPay is cheaper and affordable when compared with foreign companies as its transaction processing takes place domestically.
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