The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) is all set to launch RuPay credit card by this December, a top official of the organisation has revealed.
The NPCI had previously planned to launch the credit card in June but it extended the timeline “as we have to get the technology ready. We will definitely launch it by December this year”, a media report quoted A. P. Hota, managing director and chief executive officer, NCPI, the umbrella organisation promoted by banks and supported by the RBI to tackle all retail payment systems in the country, as saying recently.
Agreements with banks, said Hota, are already in place and procedural guidelines have been created. He exuded confidence that “at least five banks in India will use our RuPay credit card by March 2017.”
He further said RuPay debit cards reached 282 million-mark recently and it now accounts for 32 percent of the debit card market. “We have started from the scratch and reached the milestone in just three-and-a-half years. Over 600 banks are using RuPay card in India.”
To take the RuPay debit card global, the NPCI has entered into a tie-up with US-based debit and credit card firm Discover. “Under this tie-up, the US company will facilitate use of RuPay cards globally while we will facilitate use of its cards in India. We will also tap the partnership for our credit foray,” he said.
The NPCI presently has both domestic and international debit cards. It offers PMJDY Card, Classic and Platinum as three categories of cards.
China is in the processing of building its own global credit and debit on the lines of Mastercard, Visa and Discover, the official added.
The NPCI has 10 promoter banks namely, State Bank of India, Punjab National Bank, Canara Bank, Bank of Baroda, Union Bank of India, Bank of India, ICICI Bank, HDFC Bank, Citibank and HSBC. In last five years, the organization has grown multi-fold from 2 million transactions a day to 20 million transactions at present.
It may be noted that RuPay Card is an Indian version of credit/debit card. It is very similar to international cards such as Visa/Master.
