Paytm to leverage the power of India Stack in upcoming payments bank

Mobile wallet major, Paytm announced that it would have a deep integration with India Stack to leverage the platform’s open-stack technology and ensure the best possible experience for its customers and merchants. The company has implemented India Stack components like eSign and eKYC to ensure great scalability for its mobile payments and commerce solutions.

IndiaStack is a paperless and cashless service delivery system being conceived by a digital think tank iSpirt. For Paytm UPI compliance and interoperability is the key to its strategy for its upcoming Payments Bank. 

As part of its compliance, all Paytm Payments Bank customers will be able to add money to their Paytm wallet through any UPI-enabled app, transfer money to any bank account from their existing bank account through Paytm’s UPI interface, and all Paytm merchant QR codes will be UPI-interoperable, which means all merchants in the Paytm ecosystem can accept payments from other UPI apps.

“We will leverage the power of India Stack starting from Aadhar to UPI to DigiLocker in our upcoming Payments Bank. This will allow us to offer cost-effective services to Indians and bring us closer to our goal of bringing half a billion Indians to the mainstream economy,” Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Founder and CEO of Paytm said.

According to iSpirt, IndiaStack is a series of new-age digital infrastructure which, when used together, makes it easier for digital companies to run faster, reach more people.

The Stack has four layers, a presence-less layer where a universal biometric digital identity allows people to participate in any service from anywhere in the country, a paper-less layer where digital records move with an individual’s digital identity, cashless layer where a single interface to all the country’s bank accounts and wallets democratises payments and a consent layer which allows data to move freely and securely to democratise the market for data.

“The power of UPI will enable millions of Indian consumers to send or receive money in any bank account and merchants to accept payments from any bank account. This will pave the way for a truly interoperable cashless society in India and help India leapfrog into the world of universal financial inclusion,” Nandan Nilekani, Mentor, iSPIRT, mentor said. 

Currently over a million offline merchants across India accept Paytm as their preferred payment mode. The company has around 160 million users.

India Stack fast facts:

* According to iSpirt, IndiaStack is a paperless and cashless service delivery system

* It can enable the government, the citizens and entrepreneurs to interact with each other through an open digital platform

* It is the largest application programming interface that is being developed in order to enable 1.2 billion Indians to get access to goods and services digitally

* It was conceived by the government of India in 2012 when they realised, in order to help services reach the last mile of the Indian population, it needed private technology solutions to be built on the Aadhaar database 

* The project is being taken forward by Nandan Nilekani the ex-chief of Unique Identification Database Authority of India, who describes it as the “Whatsapp moment for Indian banking”