Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a 53 per cent increase in the volume of payments transactions in the past 12 months. There has also been an increase of 28 per cent in the same period, P Vasudevan, Chief General Manager of Payment and Settlement Systems at Reserve Bank of India (RBI) stated at a session of the Digital Money Conference, organised by the Payments Council of India (PCI).
In volume terms, the CAGR for the past five years has been 42 per cent. It indicates that the last 12 months have seen significant growth as compared to the last five years.
“Today, we process 21.79 crore payments transactions on a daily basis. It is heartening to recollect that in December last year the RTGS was made operational 24x7x365. Till date, many initiatives have been undertaken to capitalise on this. The payment systems like NACH, Bharat Bill Payment were enabled to settle on weekends. The number of settlements in a week has increased by 200, thereby bringing down the credit and settlement risks in the ecosystem,” stated Vasudevan.
PCI’s Digital Money Conference was centered around the theme of ‘Innovation to Scale’ and was attended by 2,500 delegates over 30 sessions. It discusses how innovation enables payments stakeholders to organically scale up digital payments while ensuring that existing operations perform consistently and sustainably.
Formed under the aegis of IAMAI in 2013, PCI caters to the needs of the digital payments industry. It was formed to represent the multiple regulated non-banking payment industry players, and address industry issues. The council works to promote the payments industry and aims to create a less-cash society.
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