BENGALURU: The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has shortlisted four start-ups — CityCash, ToneTag, Ubona Technologies, and Eroute Technologies — to push offline payments for the underserved population in the country though its regulatory sandbox initiative. Total number of start-ups in the first cohort is now six with two firms having joined the club in November.
The central bank’s programme announced last year envisages to promote three fintech areas: offline payments, feature phone and contactless transactions especially for the population living in areas where the internet connectivity is still a concern.
Under the regulatory sandbox initiative, the start-ups will test their applications in a secure environment using a dummy data which upon the successful implementation, will be scaled in a real environment through partnerships with banks and non-banking financial companies.
During the pandemic, the RBI had emphasised on the need for digital adoption in the financial sector and urged start-ups to develop deep-tech solutions to limit the dependency on cash on the lines of UPI as well as cardless cash withdrawals.