New Delhi India will showcase its fintech prowess at the G20 Summit — including approving bank credits to farmers and small businesses in minutes, cost-effective global payment solutions as an alternative to MasterCard and Visa, and applications allowing non-residents to pay their utility bills from abroad — two senior officials said on Tuesday.
It is possible that some of the developed countries may not be interested in such solutions because they already have dominant market players, but the fintech products will help developing nations, particularly from the Global South, they added, requesting anonymity.
The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) will showcase five such products at the Summit – the public tech platform for frictionless credit or PTP, the central bank digital currency (CBDC), UPI One World, RuPay On-The-Go, and Bharat bill payment system (BBPS), one of them said.
He added that RBI will give live demonstrations of these services, and India’s digital currency will be showcased through live digital rupee transactions by select banks participating in the pilot.
According to the officials, UPI is one of India’s big successes, and several countries are already keen to either have the technology or to link it with their digital currencies. “The UPI One World will on board the visitors to the system without having a bank account in India and they will benefit in the process to have a first-hand experience of breezing payments through UPI,” the official cited above added.
The RuPay On-The-Go – another fintech solution – allows customers to carry out contactless transactions through digital accessories such as watches and keyrings, and highlights the adaptability of the domestic card scheme associated products at par with such global products, he said.
RBI will also showcase BBPS as an option for cross-border bill payments. Non-resident Indians (NRIs) can use it to make various types of payments to Indian utilities from abroad, he added.
Stressing on the importance of these fintech solutions, a second official said the RBI’s pilot project of providing loans to farmers and dairy sector in just 15-20 minutes is an example of the frictionless credit system under PTP.
While a revolving credit facility to farmers is available through Kisan Credit Cards (KCC), manual processing of such loan applications takes 2-4 weeks, is cumbersome, and has an operational cost. Now, collateral-free KCC loans up to ₹1.6 lakh per farmer are possible by using digital technology in minutes, he said.
He added that the pilot was successfully running in some districts of Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra that were using digitised land records database created by states to verify creditworthiness. “Farmers can now apply for new KCC loans as well as KCC renewal, directly from their fields or home on smartphones or tablets anytime,” he said A similar digital pilot was launched in Gujarat, extending credit to dairy farmers based on their milk pouring data, he added.
“RBI plans to extend this facility in all areas – loans to micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs), personal loans, education loans and so on depending on the level of digitisation of key data,” he said.
“An experience centre would be available for the delegates and visitors to experience an interactive demonstration of the entire process on-boarding to sanction and disbursement of the KCC and dairy loans in an entirely digital manner in a few minutes, revolutionising rural credit,” the first official said.
