NEW DELHI: If Indian banks continue to neglect the online payments business, they could end up losing bulk of their traditional business to digital wallets platforms such as Google Pay and PhonePe, Kotak Mahindra Bank CEO Uday Kotak warned on Friday.
Speaking at an event, he said Indian bankers have been short-sighted on the payments business, leading to unified payments interface (UPI) payments being monopolised by the two major digital wallets, which control 85% of the market share.
“Wake up or you will see large parts of the traditional financial markets move out,” he said at the Infinity Forum organised by the International Financial Services Centres Authority and Bloomberg.
“Bankers were short-sighted. Their standard response was that there is no money in the payments business,” said Kotak.
To tide over competition, he advised bankers to adopt a customer-centric approach instead of a sales-centric one.
For this, lenders must hire more talent and significantly scale up their technologies, he added. At the same time, Kotak said regulators need to be alert about the use of data by these fintech companies, he added.