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UPI, RuPay Cards To Soon Be Accepted In France As Payments.

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After revolutionizing digital payments in India, the Unified Payment Interface (UPI) is about to go live in France. NPCI Overseas, the international arm of the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Lyra Network of France for the adoption of UPI and RuPay Cards in the country.

Unified Payments Interface and RuPay cards will soon be accepted in France, according to a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signed by NPCI International Payments Limited (NIPL) on Thursday with French payment services business Lyra Network. The announcement comes months after NPCI collaborated with firms such as Discover Financial Services (DFS) of the United States, Bhutan’s Royal Monetary Authority (RMA), Japan Credit Bureau (JCB) of Japan, and Network for Electronic Transfers (NETS) of Singapore to spread UPI and RuPay beyond India. The payments division’s parent business, NPCI International, announced on Twitter that it has collaborated with Lyra Network to launch UPI and RuPay cards in France.

“Considering India doing 5.5 billion UPI transactions per month, this strategic partnership will definitely prove to be a game-changer in the digital payments ecosystem,” IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said in a statement.

Source: gadgets360.com

The minister also stated that the collaboration will be a step toward making Unified Payment Interface available to the rest of the world.

In April 2020, the NPCI Board of Directors and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) created NIPL as a subsidiary of NPCI to increase the deployment of UPI and RuPay solutions outside of India. Since then, the worldwide body has collaborated with many organizations, payment networks, and banks in several countries to expand NPCI’s digital payment offerings.

UPI
Image source: thequint.com

NIPL collaborated with Bhutan’s central bank RMA in July of last year to enable QR-based Unified Payment Interface transactions in the country. It was an increase in NIPL’s presence in the Bhutanese market, as it had previously accepted and issued RuPay cards. This launch was expected to assist over 200,000 Indian tourists who visit Bhutan each year.

In February of this year, NIPL also collaborated with payments gateway Gateway Payments Service and fintech firm Manam Infotech to facilitate UPI-based payments in Nepal.

In May 2022, UPI recorded 6 billion transactions totaling $134.3 billion.. (INR 10.4 Lakh Cr). Transaction volume on the payments platform increased by 6.6 percent month on month (MoM) beginning in April 2022. It has surpassed about 80% of the transaction volume of 2021 in the first five months of 2022.

NPCI International joined the UAE market in April after forming a partnership with Mashreq Bank’s payment arm, NeoPay. With the collaboration, NPCI enabled Indian visitors in the UAE to make seamless payments using UPI at NeoPay-enabled shops and merchant stores. Along with expanding RuPay and UPI in global markets via NIPL, the Central government is taking steps to expand the reach of NPCI’s payments offerings within India.

The NPCI granted WhatsApp’s request to expand its UPI-based payments capability to 100 million users in April. It also introduced UPI Lite as a solution to allow small-value transactions to take place offline. Similarly, it launched the ‘123Pay’ UPI service in order to offer UPI to feature phone customers.

While NPCI was established in 2018, NPCI International was established as a wholly-owned subsidiary of NPCI in 2020. The international arm works on RuPay and UPI deployment outside of India.

The RBI recently declared that credit cards would be able to be linked to the UPI. The central bank stated that the service would initially be available solely on RuPay cards. Till now, only debit cards were authorized to be associated with the payment system. The change is likely to increase credit card transactions as well as boost the use of UPI.

MobiKwik to take on Paytm with new funding round

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Paytm, India’s leading wallet and payments company now backed by high-profile investors like Alibaba and Softbank, has always been on the top when it comes to digital payment market in India. Call it the first mover’s advantage at work. On top of that, last year’s demonetization came like a sweet spring for the whole online transaction business in India. Paytm was the biggest gainer of demonetization among all wallet businesses in India. But, there is another wallet and payments solution that is growing quickly, MobiKwik.

MobiKwik- the brand which focuses entirely on mobile payments and stands second to Paytm in India- is pretty confident that the company can convert their unidirectional approach towards online payments into an advantage when competition is focusing more towards diversifying into other fields like e-commerce and banking.

Recently, in a talk with TechCrunch, Co-founder Upasana Taku confirmed that they are currently in a negotiation for an investment of $100 million-$150 million which is going to come at a valuation of $1 billion. Taku declined, when asked about the major names her company is going to receive funds from, but made it clear that there is only one major strategic investor involved along with some financial institutions. Expect the round to be closed in next couple of months, putting the company into much valued tech unicorns club.

Well, that’s a lot of money to put into a strategy and we hope MobiKwik has a polished one as they are going against Paytm; top of the league. As of now, plan is to invest around $45 million on expanding the brand’s presence and offices to new users and merchants.

Paytm is pushing its business into e-commerce, influenced by Alibaba’s presence. That’s not it, they are stepping into digital banking as well and if the sources are correct, there is yet another project which is going to launch soon and drives heavily from Chinese market.

“It is reneging on payments while it is pushing bank and e-commerce services. Something’s got to give, it is not possible to do justice on 10 different verticals.” She told to Techcrunch. She also quoted Ola money’s example to justify her statement. “I don’t see Ola Money accepted in many places”

Upasana Taku  also opened up about the company’s future goal of providing financial services like insurance, loans, and investing alongside partners, all via co-branded wallet app. Today digital payment accounts for just 15 percent of the total amount of $1.5 trillion in India and she believes that number can increase up to even 70 percent in next few years.

CEO who once struggled to speak English now commands $3 Billion Company

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Being not able to speak or being fluent in English, a global business language that binds billions of people will certainly lower your confidence and may become a source of  humiliation at the work place and business meetings. You might consider this shortcoming as your biggest weakness to professional growth.

However, some dare to defy the set standards of society & business world. Those who have the dream to do something bigger in life, keep their head down, face the challenges with courage and keep working towards the bigger dream.

One such person is Vijay Shekhar Sharma, the founder of PayTM, a $3 billion e-commerce and payments company from India.

Winners do things differently
Vijay Shekhar Sharma was born in the city of Aligarh (UP), India to a humble family. With no bigger life goal than to complete his engineering degree and land up in a job and serve his family, he left Aligarh after completing his schooling to pursue an engineering degree at Delhi College of Engineering.

Vijay entered the Delhi College of Engineering with great enthusiasm and zeal at the age of 15. Vijay who had studied all his life in Hindi medium wasn’t able to understand a word in classroom where lectures were delivered only in English. Even his classmates preferred English to converse. Vijay shifted to back benches to avoid attention and even started to bunk lectures.  This was testing time for him but then Vijay decided to take this thing head on and win the battle. He started to read English magazines & dictionaries borrowed from others.

He read lot of English business magazines during his college time. This arouse his curiosity about internet and software.

Entrepreneurship is bed of thorns
Inspired from Yahoo and Sabeer Bhatia, Vijay launched a company named Xs while in college. He along with his batch mates built a website that had web directories, web-guided services and a search engine. Vijay also got seed money from a Angel Investor, a New Mexico-based venture capital fund. Vijay sold the company in 1999 to Living Media India (India Today Group) for half a million dollars. Vijay bought his first color TV with the money and also paid of his father’s loan.

From One97 to PayTM
Vijay co-founded One97 with Rajiv Shukla, a mobile VAS company in 2000. But in 2001 company got hit by post 9/11 market crises. His partner left and Vijay was left with no money. He was forced to travel in buses and even on foot to save money for dinner & tea. He had to take a job amid family pressure to get settled in life. After few months Vijay left the job to get back to entrepreneurship.

Vijay continued with One97 and lunched services like mobile astronomy, music messaging, ringtones etc. and got series A and series B funding.

In 2010, Vijay launched PayTM, an online mobile recharge platform. Vijay in 2011 coined the idea of mobile payments to company board but board wasn’t convinced. But, a confident Vijay offered to put in $2 million of his own equity to launch PayTM. RBI’s  approval of semi closed wallet in 2012-13 paved the way for the launch PayTM payment wallet and marketplace. In 2014-15 PayTM secured a funding to the tune $100 million in series A from Alibaba, Alipay and SAIF.

PayTM is now doing an average transactions worth Rupees 30 million on daily basis and is backed by industry legends like Ratan Tata. It has a network of 16,000 online and 10,000 offline registered merchants and is projected to increase to 100,000 merchants. Currently, PayTM is valued at $ 3 billion after the latest funding round of $680 million from Ant Financial of Alibaba. Recently PayTM has launched in-store payments from wallet as well.

With the personal experience of hard achieved success, Vijay refrains to call the staff at his office as employees, he prefers to call them as colleagues or teammates understanding their contribution also towards growth of the company. He also distributed 4% of his equity worth $120 million to his team.

The meteoric success came to Vijay with all his own hard work and sheer determination. Rise of a man with humble background against all odds and hurdles like language, early debacle of business and a reluctant board at One97,  he stands as an inspiration and attestation behind the saying “A man makes his own destiny”.

 “To the winners, who won because they didn’t give up.”- Vijay Shekhar Sharma