India’s domestic payment card scheme took a leap forward this month with the National Payments Corp. of India collaborating with two banks to launch RuPay-branded ATM cards.
On May 14, Maharashtra-based cooperative Gopinath Patil Partik Janata Sahkari Bank began issuing India’s first RuPay ATM Card, and regional rural bank Kashi Gomti Samyut Gramin Bank announced on May 23 the launch of its own ATM card called the RuPay Gramin Card.
National Payments will continue to work with cooperative and regional rural banks in the initial phase of the RuPay launch as part of the Reserve Bank of India’s mandate to support financial inclusion in the country’s rural areas, a spokesperson for the state-owned authority tells PaymentsSource.
“Debit and then credit cards will be launched perhaps in 2012 after we first work toward strengthening the technology platform,” he adds.
Because the payments corporation is in charge of the country’s ATM switch, customers of the two banks now may use RuPay ATM cards to access 87,000 ATMs in India, according to the official.
National Payments designed RuPay to be a payment card scheme designed to compete with Visa Inc. and MasterCard Worldwide for transactions initiate domestically (
High transaction fees, typically around 5 rupees (10 U.S. cents or 7 euro cents), that Visa, MasterCard and other brands impose on Indian banks necessitated the effort to establish a domestic brand. Banks that support Rupay will pay National Payments a much lesser fee of 0.8 rupees for ATM transactions routed through the National Financial Switch of India, which the payments corporation maintains.
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