50p 2018

India has a rich and diverse payments infrastructure. The eco-system of Payment Service Providers (PSPs) has undergone rapid evolution in India over the recent past with the advances in technology and yet, there still exists hurdles to enabling ubiquitous access to payment services. In 2016, the Committee on Digital Payments (the Watal Committee) was formed with the objective of reviewing the existing payments landscape in India and proposing measures to promote access to digital payments.The committee released its “Medium Term Recommendations to Strengthen Digital Payments Ecosystem” which proposed comprehensive changes to the regulatory architecture governing the payments ecosystem in India. Over the last year, however, we have seen little if not no changes towards achieving the objectives laid out by the Watal Committee and issues that the committee sought to address still exist.

In this talk, we aim to:

(1) provide an overview of the payments ecosystem in India and evolution of regulations of different entities namely, Universal banks, Payments Banks and non-bank PPIs issuers
(2) trace the effects of the existing regulatory regime of different PSPs and its impact on the larger financial system
(3) review the recommendations by the Watal committee and trace the progress (or lack thereof) of its implementations

Outline

The ouline of the talk would roughly be as follows:

• Payments as a utility: The economic function of payments and its importance
• The Payments eco-system in India
• Regulatory Architecture of different payment service providers
• Overview of Watal Committee recommendations and its progress
• Emerging Regulatory Concerns for the financial system

Speaker bio

Nishanth Kumar is a Senior Policy Associate at Dvara Research (formerly known as IFMR Finance Foundation) specialising in the area of Financial Systems Design. Full bio is available at http://foundation.ifmr.co.in/about-us/ (under the “Team” tab)