NPCI’s finest moment will be ensuring faster and smoother rollout of the Aadhaar Payment System, its MD & CEO A P Hota tells Sunitha Natti of Sunday Express. Excerpts:
How is APS different from existing systems?
It’s a revolutionary payments product that works card-less and mobile-less. In rural areas, there are neither that many smartphones, nor is the usage of plastic cards high. There are several RuPay cardholders, but initially to enroll each one of them will take quite a while as they need to get familiar with a card payment system. In this context, using the Aadhaar number will prove to be much simpler.
How will this change cashless transactions?
Currently, the digital payments infrastructure is limited to a PoS terminal, where one has to use a debit or credit card, or use a mobile phone to execute the transaction. But now, even mobile phone is not required. All customers have to do is, know their Aadhaar number and the name of the bank to make a transaction.
How will this work?
The merchant has to have a smartphone and a dongle which costs around Rs 2,000. Initially, banks will provide the dongle spending a few thousands to make the merchant terminal operational. As of now 16 banks including large banks like SBI have started APS. The goal is to rope in 30 banks in about one month’s time. The Ministry of Finance has given targets (number of transactions or merchant reach) to individual banks, which ranges from a few thousand to a few lakh. By September, the idea is to get one million merchants on board.
How are the security concerns around Aadhaar being addressed?
The UIDAI is giving a notification according to which all the devices the merchants use should be certified by UIDAI by June 1. The dongles attached to the merchants’ mobile will be a certified dongle and those that are not certified, won’t work for APS after June 1. There are two levels of security -- level 0 and level 1 – which address software and hardware issues respectively.
Will APS find acceptance among rural consumers?
IDFC and State Bank of India have already done a pilot. In fact, all the 16 banks have already done pilots of some scale. It will be formally launched on April 14 and the government is planning to roll out literacy programme and campaigns to familiarize users with the benefits and the acceptance will happen slowly.