The Economic Times Cards and Payment Summit 2019 underscored the fintech revolution
By highlighting the latest and greatest in the field of payment innovations, the summit offered insights on how to make the most of these technological advances
The Economic Times Cards and Payment Summit 2019, held at Sahara Star, Mumbai, highlighted achieving customer centricity with payments innovation. The power packed sessions brought innovative digital solutions to the fore and shed light on future challenges for the payments industry.
The summit began with a powerful address by Philip G Heasley, President and CEO, ACI Worldwide, who said, “Once we accept the fact that digital commerce from any point of the world can be sold to the rest of the world, you need to be able to deliberate highly digital fashion well.Then this is going to have a digital payment infrastructure, and this is going to have to be respectfulof thesovereignty of those structures.We just think it’s going to land up becoming perhaps in little ten years the most prevalent method of payment in the world.”
Chief guest Shri Deepak Vasant Kesarkar, Honorable Minister of State of Finance, Planning, & Home (Rural), Government of Maharashtra,noted,“The government of Maharashtra has taken mini strategic initiatives to take banking and ease of payment to every citizen. The government promotes digital mediums of banking and payments and have ensured that its people will have easy and quick access to the government and other services. Today our efforts have made Nagpur the first city of India where all gram panchayats are digitally connected. Such large-scale initiatives have contributed immensely to restructuring of financial and digital services in the hinterland of Maharashtra.”
The leaders in attendance discussed about the cashless society – a dream or a myth, where Manish Jain,Partner – Financial Services, Digital Strategy and Innovation, KPMG said, “If you look at RBI’s vision document,their vision for the future is very simple in terms of providing every Indian with access to digital paymentsthat are safe, secure, convenient, quick and affordable. I think that summarizes what the whole thing in terms of what India is looking for digital payments as a whole across the world.And from that perspective, there are four goalposts, which were mentioned in the document and which is about competition, cost, convivence and confidence.So I think if we cover all these points, digital payments will be definitely a success, and it is the India model that the entire world will look at.”
Sudipta Roy, Head – Unsecured Assets, ICICI Bank opined,“While there is a cash out when people are receiving benefits, the digital utilization to then make paymentsare not there.”
Ganesh Ananthanarayanan, COO, Airtel Payments Banksaid“One of the reasons for digital transactions to digitally grow especially in the offline space is if they’re able to bring down the cost of device through alternate innovations.”
Sajith Sivanandan, MD and Business Head- Payments and Next billion users initiatives, Google Indiaadds , “As we’ve grown, services like Google Pay and others tend to extend beyond tier 1 cities.Digitizing payments is just not a metro phenomenon, a fundamental aspect of cashless society is that it doesn’t depend on distribution but the safety and security.”
“In order to change the game for India, we have to invest in interoperable systems and make sure safety and security is at the heart of everything we do in the form of innovation”,statedMurali Nair, VP and Head of Business Development, VISA.
Praveena Rai, COO, NPCI said, “There is an element of trust; the consumer wants to receive the item before they actually pay for it. This also adds on to a lot of cost to various e-commerce players.”
In a special address on tapping into India’s digital payments revolution,Kaku Nakhate President and Country Head (India), Bank of America N.A stated, “The Indian industry is rapidly adopting technology in payment system primarily through mobile wallet apps and now various APIs. Many banks including us independently or in partnership have developed technology to digitize the entire payment cycle, thereby reducing the working capital cycles, enabling cheaper credit to intermediaries and overall reducing the cost of inventory management, a real good cost efficiency for our country. I believe India is at an inflection point of digital revolution where fintech is impacting at various sub sectors like lending, life insurance, remittances, investments in mutual fund etc.”
India’s payments sector is laying greater emphasis on providing improved services to customers and upgrading legacy technology infrastructures to enhance the overall experience, and The Economic Times Cards and Payment Summit brought together experts from the industry so that they could have a continued dialogue as they discussed the latest trends and service offerings that would help boost the sector further.
About Times Strategic Solutions Limited
Times Strategic Solutions Ltd., functional under the brand name ET Edge, is an Economic Times initiative founded to empower multiple industries and segments by sharing critical business knowledge through strategic conferences and summits. Encompassing the Indian business vista, ET Edge strives to bring together visionaries and key leaders on its knowledge platforms to create social and business ecology conducive to the positive changes required by the industry. The main aim of this initiative is to channel global business intelligence through summits and conferences in overarching lectures, hands-on workshops, panels, roundtables and case studies.