Reserve Bank of India (RBI) in its latest data has showed that between 2015-16 and 2019-20, digital payment volumes have grown at a compounded annual growth rate of 55.1 per cent - from 5.93 billion transactions in the year to March 2016 to 34.35 billion transactions in the year to March 2020. In value terms, they have grown from Rs 920.38 trillion to Rs 1,623.05 trillion during this period, clipping at an annual compounded rate of 15.2 per cent. It showed that concerted efforts by RBI to move to a non/less-cash economy by pushing digital payments have begun to pay rich dividends as the volume of such payments has jumped manifold in the past five years.
Giving a year-wise data, in 2016-17 digital payments jumped to 9.69 billion transactions from 5.93 billion transactions in the previous year in volume terms, while in value the same rose to Rs 1,120.99 trillion. Similarly, the numbers continued to scale new peaks with volume growing to 1,4.59 billion transactions and value jumping to Rs 1,369.86 trillion in 2017-18. Come 2018-19, the numbers clipped at a faster pace with volume jumping to 2,3.43 billion transactions while the value rose to Rs 1,638.52 trillion.
However, FY20 saw a massive spike in volumes over the previous year to 3,4.34 billion transactions but in value slipped down to Rs 1,623.05 trillion, which can be attributed to the steep fall in the overall economy and the massive job losses, forcing people to spend less and preserve more cash. Some of the recent RBI initiatives for enhancing security and increase customer confidence in digital payments include mandating use of only EMV chip and PIN-based debit and credit cards from January 2019; tokenisation from January 2019, when RBI issued a framework for tokenisation of card transactions which allowed all authorised card networks to offer tokenisation services, irrespective of the app provider, use case; facility to switch on/off transaction rights; mandatory positive confirmation to remove any ambiguity for funds transferred through NEFT and RTGS from March 2010, and January 2019, respectively.
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