What is RuPay Debit Card

National Payment Corporation of India (NPCI) promoted by RBI on 26 March 2012 launched an Indian payment gateway system as an alternate solution to Mastercard and Visa which are widely used across the world and have dominance even in India.

RuPay Card Logo

As of now RuPay debit card has been issued. Processing of RuPay card is done by the payment gateway company CCAvenue which powers more than 80% of eCommerce merchants in the country. Card issuing banks will have to pay fees for every transaction to the company which will setup machines and thus generate revenues.

RuPay Card Advantages

1) Accepted at around 1,45,270 ATMs.

2) Acceptance by over 8,75,000 point-of-sale (PoS) terminals

3) Over 10,000 E-commerce sites have added RuPay is one of the payment method. For e.g. coke2home.com, justrechargeit.com and futurebazaar.com now accept this card.

4) Accepted at around 1.8 lakh merchant terminals in India out of the current 8 lakhs

5) Transaction fee charged to the merchant is 0.01%

6) Transaction limit is very high. Of course this will vary from bank to bank

7) Customers will get SMS alert for every transaction done through their card

Disadvantages

1) Visa and Mastercard provides rewards points and at this stage there is no such update on the reward points system by RuPay card

2) No updates available on issuance and annual fees.

Application – How to Get RuPay Card

Indian consumers can apply for RuPay Cards at the public banks and private sector banks. And is also issued by over 200 co-operative and rural banks in the country. Here's the list of few these banks where application of RuPay cards can be made:

1) Public sector banks: For easy access, wherever possible links to the bank website are mentioned below:

• Central Bank of India
• State Bank of India
• Bank of Baroda
• Punjab National Bank
• Bank of India
• Union Bank of India
• Punjab and Sind Bank. Download RuPay application form here

2) Private Sector banks: Federal bank is first private sector bank in India to launch RuPay card. Click latest news by bank here

Existing customers having savings or current bank accounts in any of these banks can apply for RuPay card. Recently Indian government has asked public banks to issue RuPay card to their existing customers and install terminals which can accept this payment. However this does not mean these banks will stop issuing Visa and Mastercards. But government is stressing on giving more focus to country's own card.

Benefits of Launching RuPay Card

With an aim of not to generate profit at this stage, following are the main reasons to launch RuPay debit card

1) Reducing the cash usage

2) Very cost effective: Transaction cost is very less as compared to internationally used Visa and Mastercard since the whole process will take place within India. So Indian banks have to pay fees in Rupees to international payment companies and thus saving on foreign currency.

3) Cost of clearance would be low due to processing within India

4) Reduced dependence on card systems currently used worldwide

5) Huge savings to Indian consumers

6) As all the transaction data would be available in India and thus prevent customer purchase data going out of the country

7) People with no or limited access to banking and financial services can easily avail the cards as they would be available in rural areas as well

Do you know about cardless cash withdrawal, a new service offered by Indian banks?

Statistics So Far

1) Since it's launch in 2012, over 20 million RuPay cards have been issued

2) Backed by consortium of Indian banks

3) By 2014, target is to issue 10 million and this won't be possible unless banks take speedy action on this.

Plans Ahead:

1) NCPI has outlined their plan for future for launching EMV cards

2) Contact less cards

3) Credit cards

Local Cards by Other Countries:

Many countries have created their own payment firms such as China (UnionPay), Singapore (AsiaPay) and Brazil(allpago)