Cards in play: Sandeep Ghosh on the opportunity in cash conversion

Despite UPI's dominance, the digital payments game is far from over, Ghosh tells Manojit Saha, pointing to the opportunity that lies in cash conversion

At Burma Burma in Mumbai’s Bandra-Kurla Complex, the soundtrack is conspicuously subdued. In a business district where power lunches often compete with pounding music, this restaurant offers a rare space to talk. That, says Sandeep Ghosh, group country manager, India and South Asia, Visa, is precisely why he chose it. The cuisine may be vegetarian Burmese — “Bengali and veg food don’t always go hand in hand,” he laughs — but the quieter setting makes it ideal for a conversation about one of India’s most talked about revolutions: Digital payments. 

Few sectors have transformed India as dramatically over the past decade as digital payments. Since the launch of the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) on April 11, 2016, the country has leapfrogged into a new payment paradigm. In calendar 2025 alone, UPI recorded over 228 billion transactions, worth nearly ₹300 trillion, according to the National Payments Corporation of India. December saw a record 21.63 billion transactions, valued at ₹27.97 trillion.  

QR codes (quick response machine-readable barcodes) have become as ubiquitous as shop signs, and even the smallest roadside vendor now gestures towards a squiggly square when it’s time to make the payment. 

Against this backdrop, where do global card networks like Visa, among the largest in the world, stand? 

Credit card transactions, though substantial, are still less than 10 per cent of UPI by value. Up to December 2025 (calendar year), credit card spending totalled ₹23.18 trillion, a fraction of UPI’s scale. Has the meteoric rise of QR code-based payments hurt card networks? 

Ghosh is candid. A portion of the business — particularly debit, and to a smaller extent credit — has felt the disruption. But he is far from defensive. “For companies like Visa, so far as consumer payments are concerned, we are in the business of displacing cash,” he says. “The common enemy is cash.” 

He sees my eyes widen. Yes, not UPI. Not RuPay. Not other global networks. Cash. 

Nearly 50 per cent of India’s consumer spending — that’s roughly $1 trillion — is still conducted in cash. Step outside the metros and mini-metros into Tier-II, -III and -IV towns, and the cash economy remains dominant, says Ghosh. 

In other words, India’s payments story is far from complete. 

Compared to markets such as the United Kingdom, Singapore, Hong Kong or Scandinavian countries, where cash usage for transactions has fallen to around 10 per cent, India has a long runway ahead. The opportunity for digital players lies not merely in competing with one another, but in formalising this vast swath of informal commerce. 

As we order Samuza Hincho, a Burmese fusion dish with small samosas served in a tangy, spicy broth with crisp spring vegetables and spiced black chickpeas, Ghosh reflects on his own professional journey. It spans industries as diverse as his palate, which leads him to restaurants that range from Mizu to Wasabi and Bombay Canteen in Mumbai, and to Paturi in Dhaka, Bangladesh, which, he says, serves one of best Bengali cuisines. 

A Mumbai native, he grew up in the city, graduated from Sydenham College of Commerce and Economics, and went on to complete his MBA at IIM Ahmedabad. His career began in the world of fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG), where he served as category head-Marketing, South Asia at PepsiCo. He later spent nearly a decade at Citibank, heading commercial banking operations in India. There were stints at Bharti Axa Life Insurance and EY before he joined Visa in 2022. 

“My roots in financial services came from Citi,” he says, drawing a line from those early banking years to his current role. 

The cross-sector experience appears to shape his worldview, and prove useful in the role he holds today. Payments, after all, sit at the junction where consumer behaviour, technology, risk, regulation, and economics converge. “Sometimes we joke about it, that Visa is the world’s oldest fintech,” Ghosh says. “In every sense it is a fintech company, set up 60 years ago.” Long before “fintech” became a buzzword, Visa was building digital rails for commerce. “Visa started using artificial intelligence and machine learning some 30 years ago,” he adds, highlighting the network’s long investment in fraud detection and risk analytics. 

That investment has become even more critical as digital transactions scale. Technology has advanced, but so have digital frauds. While Ghosh does not dwell on specific threats, he repeatedly returns to the importance of authentication, toke­nisation and intelligent risk management. These are systems, he says, that work invisibly but surely in the background. 

The main course arrives: The restaurant’s signature ‘Oh No Khowsuey’, a creamy coconut milk curry infused with lemongrass and tamarind, served with noodles. The flavours are complex, but the dish goes down smoothly. We are, however, about to venture into a subject of friction. 

One of the biggest friction points for card payments, particularly in e-commerce, he says, is in the transaction flow. A customer must enter the 16-digit card number, expiry date and CVV (card verification value), followed by an OTP (one-time password) authentication. Even when card details are saved, the OTP step often causes transactions to fail due to delays or technical glitches, he maintains. 

To address this, Visa is preparing to roll out ‘Visa Payment Passkey’ in India. The solution, he explains, is designed to identify and authenticate digital users in a more seamless manner. “This allows the network and the issuer to be able to authenticate a transaction without the need for an OTP up to a certain amount of money,” he says. It is an issuer-based authentication, which means banks determine transaction limits according to their own risk tolerance. 

The aim is twofold: Reduce friction for consumers; and improve authorisation rates, while maintaining high security standards. Enhanced transaction data and advanced fraud prevention techniques, he adds, are at the core of the system. With the technology ready, Visa is now working with banks, and a rollout is expected in the coming months, he lets in. 

Another initiative in the pipeline is ‘Visa Flexible Credential’, which allows customers to switch between debit, credit and reward points using the same 16-digit credential. This, he adds, blurs the lines between payment types and offers consumers greater control. 

Yet, even the most seamless technology requires acceptance infrastructure. And so, increasing the number of merchants who accept Visa cards is a top priority. Here, the conversation turns to economics. 

In India, there is no merchant discount rate (MDR) on RuPay debit cards or UPI transactions. MDR, the fee charged to merchants for accepting digital payments, is typically shared among the issuer, the network and payment processors. For global card networks, zero MDR is not a viable model. 

“While card companies like ours do not wish to work with zero MDR, we do have programmes for small merchants, and micro sellers, which allow for lower fees to be charged than the standard rates,” Ghosh says. He proposes that if fees are substantially low — “say, 5 paisa or 10 paisa” — small merchants may be willing to pay for the benefits of card acceptance. 

Visa is also working with acquiring ecosystem players to introduce low-cost card-accepting devices. 

In this context, Ghosh explains the concept of ‘Visa Accept’, a solution that allows micro-sellers to receive payments directly to their eligible Visa debit card using any NFC (near-field communication)-enabled smartphone through a banking app. NFC-enabled phones facilitate contactless payments, effectively turning smartphones into acceptance devices. The solution has already been launched in Sri Lanka and is expected to be introduced in India. 

Beyond merchant acceptance lies the question of credit penetration. India has around 115 million credit cards in force, about half of which are held by unique customers. Growth in the number of cards has slowed. Year-on-year, growth till November 2025 was 6.3 per cent, compared with 10.4 per cent in 2024 and 20.6 per cent in 2023. Debit cards, at roughly one billion, have seen stagnation owing to the UPI surge. 

“For a country of our size and scale, we are hugely under-penetrated when it comes to credit,” Ghosh says. “Even today, self-employed, small businesses do not necessarily get a credit card or unsecured loan very easily.” He draws a contrast between India and smaller economies like Brazil, which have 400-500 million cards in circulation. The implication is clear: Expanding access to formal credit remains a significant opportunity. 

Dessert arrives. ‘Berry Burst’, a coconut citrus pudding with berry caviar, almond crumble and palm jaggery. It is light, creamy and crunchy all at once, with a burst of berry flavour. It helps with the turn our conversation is now taking, to regulatory architecture and the idea of a level-playing field. 

In 2022, the Reserve Bank of India allowed credit cards to be linked to UPI, but only on the home-grown RuPay network. The expansion to other networks is still awaited. Similarly, the National Common Mobility Card is enabled only on RuPay. 

Ghosh is one for open-loop systems. “Our view is that the benefit of going open loop is that, not only Indians who have cards from any other network can use it, anyone coming from anywhere in the world can also use it because they are unlikely to have a RuPay card,” he explains. 

There is also a systemic argument. Concentration risk, he cautions, should be avoided. “All eggs should not be put in one basket,” he says, pointing to the need to prevent potential single-point failures. Ultimately, he says, customers should have a choice. 

As the lunch winds down, one theme stands out. In India’s payments debate, it is, perhaps, not a rivalry of UPI versus cards, or domestic cards versus global. It is about a larger shift, of formalising the cash-reliant sections of the economy. And while doing so, ensuring smooth, frictionless transactions and tighter digital security.