RuPay cards to work offline too

With the enhanced facility customers can store money and use that for day-to-day transit payments. The wallet feature could be used to make payments despite facing connectivity issues at point-of-sale machines as well. It is expected to boost the adoption of digital payments in the country, especially when the government has been pushing RuPay cards by nudging banks to promote these as the first option.

The National Payments Corporation of India said, these features would augment the transaction experience for new RuPay contactless cardholders and revolutionise the card payments ecosystem. The NPCI said the RuPay National Common Mobility Card's offline wallet can be used to make ticket payments in transit, including in metros, cabs, etc, enabling automatic, quick, cashless payments, thereby reducing wait time, traffic congestion and transit time.

With the offline feature, the acceptance infrastructure for RuPay will increase exponentially and will result in the rapid on-boarding of merchants and consumers across the nation, said Nalin Bansal, head of RuPay and NFS, NPCI. NPCI has also extended the offline wallet facility to retail stores on a pilot basis, after the Reserve Bank of India's approval for the pilot on retail offline transactions.

"This facility would be a boost for merchants as it reduces physical payments's time to tap-and-go mode and its easy acceptance infrastructure smoothens payments in areas of poor network coverage," the NPCI said.

Recently, the RBI also increased the limit for contactless card transactions from Rs 2,000 to Rs 5,000 from January 1, 2021. Experts said the enhanced limits for contactless cards will help millions of Indian consumers make the transition from cash to fast, convenient, and secure forms of digital payments.