In a major push for seamless cashless transactions, Govt. of India has launched Bharat QR Code, which is world’s first interoperable payment platform.
National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), which is the umbrella organisation for all digital and online retail payment systems in India, has developed this platform, which is expected to inspire and encourage more digital payments, without using debit or credit card.
QR Codes are black and white two-dimensional machine readable code, which stores information about the merchant’s bank accounts and URLs. With Bharat QR Code interface, merchants need to take a printout of their QR code (or have a soft copy) and show it to the consumer, who can simply scan the code using his or her smartphone, and the payment would be made. Instantly, seamlessly and without any hassles.
We had reported last year that Govt. is considering to create a common QR Code based payment mechanism, which has now been officially launched.
The Retail industry is excited by its possibilities because QR code-based payments solves two major problems in a single go: a) less time consumed to make the payment, compared to debit/credit card b) no requirement to actually flash your credit/debit cards for making the payment.
a) less time consumed to make the payment, compared to debit/credit card and b) no requirement to actually flash your credit/debit cards for making the payment.
b) no requirement to actually flash your credit/debit cards for making the payment.
Here are 7 interesting facts about Bharat QR Code payment system, which every debit/credit holder (who is also a bank account holder) should be aware of:
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1) Massive Collaboration
This is for the first time that all major payment gateways operating in India have joined forces to develop a common payment processing platform, based on the guidelines of RBI. NPCI (which manages RuPay cards), Visa, Mastercard and American Express have all come together to form a common ground for accepting payments. Hence, it won’t matter whether you are paying via Visa enabled debit card or the merchant has a Mastercard enabled bank account. Whether you have a Axis Bank account or the merchant has a Allahabad Bank account. The QR code shall be the common gateway for making and receiving payments from any bank, using any payment gateway.
2) Who Are Part of Bharat QR Code?
As of now, 15 banks are part of Bharat QR Code platform: SBI, Axis Bank, Bank of Baroda, Bank of India, Citi Union Bank, DCB, Karur Vysya Bank, HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, IDBI Bank, RBL Bank, Union Bank of India, Vijaya Bank and Yes Bank. More banks are soon expected to join the mega-forum.
3) How can you make payments using Bharat QR Code?
Say, you are a customer of HDFC Bank. You need to open the PayZapp app, which is HDFC Bank’s official payment app. You will scan the Bharat QR Code from within the app, enter the amount to be paid. Then, an authorization request would be sent to the bank. After verifying your identity, and the bank will send a PIN, which needs to be entered in order to make the payment complete. ICICI Bank customers will use Pockets app and so on. Hence, the official app of your bank needs to be installed for using Bharat QR Code based payments. This is the static form of payment.
4) Dynamic Payments
There is another form of payment called Dynamic payment mode. Under this, the merchant will generate a new QR code every time, for every new transaction. Here, the customer need not enter amount but simply scan the new QR Code, and enter the authorization code for completing the payment.
5) UPI Integrated
Bharat QR Code also supports UPI-based payments. Hence, BHIM App can be effectively used for making the payment. And considering BHIM App can include bank account details of various banks, it would be interoperable with various accounts.
6) Open Payment Interface
Right now, there exists several QR-code based payment interfaces. Visa’s mVisa is a prominent one, so is MasterPass QR code by MasterCard. Paytm has it’s own QR code based interface, for which they have recently allocated Rs 600 cr for expansion. But the issue with these existing QR code based payment gateways is their closed system. Hence, mVisa will only work for Visa card holders, while MasterPass will only work with MasterCard holders and the same with Paytm. However, with Bharat QR Code, Visa, Mastercard, American Express and RuPay, all users can seamless make and accept payments. Integration of Bharat QR Code will private wallets such as Paytm hasn’t been announced yet.
7) Cheaper Cashless Payments
With Bharat QR Code, the requirement of PoS machines for swiping cards goes away, which makes it more secured, less time consuming, and more importantly: cheaper. With no transaction cost involved, going cashless via Bharat QR Code will drastically bring down the total costs involved, for both the consumer and the merchant. In a way, Bharat QR Code makes cash and cashless transaction same in terms of value, and also saves time. A big win for the digital economy.
After the introduction of UPI-based payments, USSD based payments, Aadhaar pay and BHIM App, Bharat QR Code is the one of the biggest achievements of the present Govt. in order to promote and encourage cashless payments.
Now, it all depends on the execution and creating awareness about this fabulous ‘Make in India’ financial product, which is also World’s 1st such platform.
Do you read your article after writing and before publishing? Same sentence is written three times continuously.
Saurabh , try to understand the matter don’t mind on this