RBI Wants India To Be Cashless By 2021, 4X Increase in Digital Transactions Planned

With the commotion going on in financial sector regarding the step-up of digitization and reduction in carrying actual cash, the Reserve Bank of India has released its statement on the Vision document for the ‘Payment and Settlement Systems in India: Vision 2019-2021’, outlining the efforts and steps it will conduct towards swift movement in building a cashless society.

The Ins and Outs Enveloping the Vision 2019-21 Document:

With the aim of burgeoning a cashless and highly digital society, the RBI released its vision document for 2019 to 2021 on May 15, which spoke on focusing towards building an efficient, uninterrupted, secure, accessible and affordable e-payment systems.

RBI predicts to achieve this feat by sticking to the goalposts of competition, cost-effectiveness, convenience, and confidence. With combined efforts and involvement of all stakeholders, the four goal-posts of Vision 2021 has 36 specific action points over a 36-month period, for 12 specific outcomes.

• The main aim of this vision is to increase cashless payments, while maintaining safety of digital payment systems, stressing more on cyber-security as its primary and number one concern.
• RBI pursues to create customer awareness, by setting up a 24X7 helpline. It does this so that customers can have the benefit of cash saving and managing.
• It aspires to enhance customer experience and empower payment system operators and service providers, to facilitate a two-way payment ecosystem.
• RBI has strongly stated its urgency for the service providers to set up their pricing structures so that they’re transparent, affordable, while not restricting the public from accessing payment system services.
• The payment landscape shall change with innovation and entry of newer players, which will increase competition, thereby providing optimal costs to the customers.
• RBI has promised to keep minimum interference in charging prices to customers for digital payments and working tirelessly towards designing the whole experience to be efficient and price attractive.

Let the Numbers Blow Your Mind

• RBI has set a target to increase the number of digital transactions to more than four times of the number that lies today, i.e., from 2,069 crore in December 2018 to 8,707 crore in December 2021.
• RBI expects the payment infrastructure, like UPI and IMPS to register an average annual growth of over 100% and NEFT at 40% over the vision period.
• The digital payment transaction turnover is set to increase to 10.37% in 2019, 12.29% in 2020 and 14.80% in 2021.
• There has been a 35% in debit card transactions at PoS machines and at least 44% of total debit card transactions.
• RBI expects to build 5 million active PoS machines by end 2021, while debit card manufacture shall spur up to almost six times.

Like we mentioned, with the current scenario of everything being set up at a cashless point, this policy reported by RBI seems to unfold quite as planned in the coming future of 2 years.