India reaching out to many nations to leverage stack it has built: NPCI CEO

Speaking at the InFinity Forum, Dilip Asbe said there has to be a local or domestic stack because every country has its own complexities and diversities

India is reaching out to as many as 50–60 countries to leverage the stack it has built so that it can be used for the public good of the world, said Dilip Asbe, CEO, National Payments Corporation (NPCI), the umbrella organisation for retail digital payments in the country.

Speaking at the InFinity Forum, Asbe said, “We are working with Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the world bank, and we are reaching to as many as 50-60 countries, their governments and regulators because we want to leverage the stack (NPCI stack) that we have built by India so that it can become a public good of the world. We don’t want to monetise this but support the world and improve the livelihoods of people around the world and this would be the contribution of India”.

He said that there has to be a local or domestic stack because every country has its own complexities and diversities. “We at NPCI strongly believe that the country should have its own stack and then the interconnections are possible,” he said.

For example, recently, Reserve Bank of India & Monetary Authority of Singapore decided to connect Unified Payments Platform (UPI) and PayNow and do bank account to bank account transfers, which is cheaper. “This is an example of layering up the two local stacks. India has also started supporting other countries”, Asbe said.

When it comes to the Fintech revolution, there are three essential components of what India did right from a strategy perspective. The first being the Prime Minister’s vision of the JAM trinity – Jan Dhan, Aadhar, and Mobile. Second strategy that India adopted that is very different from the world is the building the public good infrastructure such as Unified Payments Interface, Aadhar, RuPay, GSTN network, etc. Thirdly, the Reserve Bank of India’s and government’s innovation led policies has resulted in the country benefiting immensely.

“Whatever growth we see in the country, be it RuPay cards, UPI transactions, Fastag transactions, have been benefited by these three strategic directions of the regulator and the government, which has not been taken by many countries in the world”, Asbe said.

Talking about Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC), an indigenously-developed and not-for-profit online network, Asbe said, the first layer in the formation of such a platform is the is the governance layer which includes formation of the public goods company, which is in the works.

“Further, with the ecosystem support, and with Ispirit, we have already formulated the rules and regulations, the standards, the protocols. We have brought in large number of technology service providers, e-commerce players, local players, the aggregators who tie up with the small merchants on the streets, to get the hyper local e-commerce on to this digital network”, Asbe said.

“About 70 per cent of the commerce is done by the Kirana shops who are not on the digital platform and with this OENDC, we believe, there will be a huge ecosystem of technology providers, aggregators, who will have their feet on the streets to onboard the various merchants on to the digital commerce network”, he added.