Removal of two-factor authentication encourages electronic payments as the country battles a cash crunch after the withdrawal of high-value currency notes. The move will likely help cab aggregators, online movie ticket sellers and shopping portals, handling low-value, high-volume transactions where digital wallets are commonly used, according to Live Mint.
Furthermore, digital wallets have clearly benefitted from demonetization so far. Paytm announced that it has registered 10 million new users since 8 November 2016, with its total user base crossing 160 million. Also, the number of offline transactions have grown five-fold in the same period, making up for 65% of all total transactions.
According to the online publication, some Indian payment experts say that “Wallets now have a penetration of 40-50 million users while credit cards don’t yet. Wallets have in some sense leapfrogged credit cards. The big spenders, the top one or two percent of the country already have credit cards and they may not choose to use wallets because the convenience factor for wallets is gone. But if think of the next 100 million users, wallets still have a usage. There will be some churn in the premium consumers, but mass users are likely to stay”.
Every day we send out a free e-mail with the most important headlines of the last 24 hours.
Subscribe now