Sweden and Denmark are a few countries that have adopted mobile payment methods successfully

As we foresee, the Digital India’s backbone will be on the mobile phone network. As in the recent past, with the rapid growth of mobile wallets, social media usage and Internet access, these behaviors will be adding to the Digital India growth story where every citizen can access internet for their day to day needs be it for money or for information to connect.

Digital payment contribution to Digital India

Any countries economy is dependent on financial transactions and that too in a transparent way. Mobile wallets are already scripting the change people do transact and because these are transparent and is traceable, the transaction will be more in white economy compared to the present cash transactions. Hence a lot of transaction can be recorded factually to estimate the real growth.

Obstacles which needs to be removed for meeting the objectives of Digital India

Few of the obstacles we feel are the slow or no connections, electricity availability and lack of awareness or trust on the modes of mobile transactions. This in fact comes from behavioural aspect of people in India. Till today we were more comfortable having cash in hand than in a wallet or in bank. Fundamentally, a lot needs to be done from infrastructure point of view to make people inclusive towards this growth. We believe we are already passing through the early adoption stage and soon we will enter the growth phase of mobility for driving Digital India growth story.

Obstacles which needs to be removed on digital payment for meeting the objectives of Digital India

One of the key obstacle is trust and availability of mobile payment models be it UPI or wallets to be available widely for transactions. The penetration is still too low for the population size of India, which transacts using cash. Even credit card or debit card penetration has not been very successful in doing cashless transaction for lack of basic infrastructure.  

Countries which have done extremely well on digital payment platform 

As per some reports, the Nordic countries i.e. Sweden and Denmark are some of the countries who have adopted mobile payment methods most successfully, being early adopter of telecom revolution and developers of telecom solutions, apart from large mobile user base. 

Role of security for meeting the objectives of Digital India

Security is going to be the corner stone of both mobile ecosystem and mobile payment as part of the Digital India story. As both these platforms are interdependent for a successful payment eco-system and the Digital India growth story, it will be vital as the vast amount of financial data generated will require very robust and strong security measure to protect it. As we know cyber threats are growing at an exponential rate and is now more sophisticated than before hence cyber security for both mobile payment and mobile phone ecosystem are going to be crucial for Digital India. 

Pravin Prashant
pravin@varindia.com