Reserve Bank of India on May 15 released a vision document, 'Payment and Settlement Systems in India: Vision 2019 - 2021', with its core theme of Empowering Exceptional (E) payment Experience that aims to achieve a highly digital and cash-lite society.
RBI targets to:
Increase digital payment transaction of GDP by 15%
Increase payment system operators
fourfold increase in digital transactions
increase debit card transactions by 35%
increase total card acceptance infrastructure to six times
Reduce currency in circulation with no specific target
Reduce the volume of cheque-based payments to less than 2%
Reduce pricing of electronic payment services by at least 100 basis points
Improve the security of digital payment systems
Facilitate mobile-based payment transactions
To achieve these objectives, the RBI outlined specific actions to take over the next two years. Some of these include:
Set up self-regulatory bodies for payment system operators, develop feature phone-based payment services to complement smartphone-based services and develop offline payment solutions and USSD-based payment solutions
Improve interoperability and build capability to process transactions of one system in another and explore the adoption of newer technologies, including distributed ledger technology for enhancement of digital payment services.
Encourage standing instructions for payment transactions and Push contact-less payments and tokenization. It plans to improve the use of bill discounting systems or TReDs and increase coverage of the cheque truncation system.
Current RBI's Policy rates and Reserve ratios:
Bank Rate: 6.25%
Repo Rate: 6.00%
Reverse Repo Rate: 5.75%
Cash Reserve Ratio: 4%
Statutory Liquidity Ratio: 19.00%