Online Payments

18% GST on merchant discount rate could be reviewed

Apple Pay could launch in India as early as October with credit card support, entering a market dominated by UPI. Here is an explainer on what is Apple Pay and how it could work

New UPI MDR rules will apply to select merchant transactions, but consumers can continue using UPI for daily payments, QR payments and AutoPay without transaction charges

The government is putting a price for merchants using its flagship digital payment network to accept large transactions - a shift that follows years of warnings from the payment industry that the annual subsidy budgeted for the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) never came close to covering the real cost of running it. From October 15, a 0.4 per cent Merchant Discount Rate (MDR) will apply to person-to-merchant UPI payments above Rs 2,000. The charge will be paid by merchants, not consumers, and will be capped at Rs 300 for transactions of Rs 75,000 or more. Payments between individuals, as well as the vast majority of everyday merchant payments, will remain free. The National Payments Corporation of India, which operates the UPI network, said the revenue will support investment in infrastructure resilience, cybersecurity, fraud prevention, innovation and customer service. "The MDR is distributed only amongst the UPI ecosystem, to further invest into infrastructure resilience, ...

Rahul Chari, cofounder and chief technology officer, outlines his plans for the next decade and addresses concerns around concentration risk

The Unique Identification Authority of India is working on plans to take Aadhaar global, especially to enable non-resident Indians and overseas citizens of India to benefit from the digital identification technology, a senior official of the digital identity organisation said on Thursday. During a fireside chat at Global Fintech Fest 2026, UIDAI CEO Saurabh Vijay said his ambition is to make the Aadhaar infrastructure best-in-class to facilitate the platform's global expansion. "I think for Aadhaar, the focus now is making Aadhaar international. We really want to work on the interoperability part of it -- how to make it more possible. So already some PoCs (proof of concept) are happening. "Our legal framework is also going (in that direction) to make Aadhaar international. We are working on policies to make it (available) for overseas citizens of India (OCIs) so that it brings in more investment," he said. Vijay said the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) launched three

Small merchants have driven UPI's mass adoption. Here's why defining who qualifies as a small merchant matters as the government creates a framework for potential MDR

UPI transactions dipped in April after March highs, but rising daily volumes signal steady growth in India's digital payments ecosystem

A decade after its launch, India's flagship payments system faced a moment of pushback, with users signalling they would abandon UPI if charges were introduced

The collaboration is aimed at solving such issues faced by direct-to-consumer (D2C) companies

India's digital payments ecosystem is moving beyond a scale-led narrative, with merchant payments emerging as the core driver of revenues and accounting for nearly three-fourths of the industry's net revenue pool, according to Bernstein's latest sector primer. The brokerage estimates the current payments revenue pool at roughly Rs 25,000 crore in gross revenues, or about Rs 15,000 crore in net revenues. This is projected to expand to nearly Rs 65,000 crore in gross revenues and approximately Rs 38,500 crore in net revenues by FY30 as digital adoption deepens and monetisation improves across payment layers. Merchant ownership allows platforms to monetise across multiple layers payment processing fees, online gateway charges, device rentals, credit card acceptance and credit distribution. Models with stronger merchant ecosystems therefore generate structurally higher yields. Within this merchant-led framework, Bernstein identified Paytm as a monetisation leader. The brokerage estimate

Airpay Payment Services on Tuesday said it has secured approval from the Reserve Bank of India to operate as a cross-border payment aggregator, completing its authorisations under the unified payment aggregator (PA) framework. With this, the company is licensed to operate as a payment aggregator across online, physical and cross-border categories, a company statement said. The milestone positions airpay as a homegrown full-stack payments infrastructure provider for Indian enterprises, D2C brands and SMEs for both domestic and global markets, it added. The company expects the launch to accelerate scale, projecting a 3040 per cent rise in processing volumes over the next 6-12 months and anticipating 20 per cent-plus revenue contribution from cross-border flows alongside onboarding over 50,000 merchants in the same period. "Indian business growth is no longer domestic-only. Our exporters, SaaS firms, digital merchants and local retailers are all engaging globally, and they need ...

Venmo announced early Thursday that an issue impacting the payment service had been fixed and it was back up and running, after users reported trouble sending and receiving money for hours. We're sorry for the inconvenience and appreciate you bearing with us while our team addressed this, the company said in a post on the social platform X. Downdetector, a website that tracks online outages, showed reports that problems began spiking at about 6:30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on Wednesday. Many people posted on social media about experiencing problems with the service, including some who said they were unable to pay for medication or buy dinner. Venmo had said Wednesday night on X that it was working on a fix. The company didn't provide any additional details about what caused the problem or how it was fixed. Peer-to-peer payment apps have exploded in popularity in the last decade. Venmo had 92 million active users as of last year.

Majority of Indians now pay for accessing content online with gaming dominating the pie in wallet share for payment size of over Rs 1,000, a survey has found, said a top official of the gaming and interactive content focused venture capital firm Lumikai. Lumikai Founder and Managing Partner Salone Sehgal told PTI that the survey covered around 3,000 mobile phone users across the country between September 2024 and September 2025. The report found that 80 per cent of those consumer bases use UPI for payments, and at least 40 per cent maintain three or four active subscriptions. She said the trend reveals that India's digitally native audience is young, data-hungry, and highly willing to pay. "We did a deep dive into where people are spending that time and what is the attention share and how does it slice. of course, social media platforms Facebook, Instagram, YouTube are a very dominant part of that but I think what was more interesting was that gaming attention share stands at about

Fintech major Razorpay has appointed Google Cloud's Prabu Rambadran as senior vice president of engineering to lead AI-first innovation, product growth, and global technology expansion

Fuelled by festive buying, the transaction through the popular Unified Payments Interface (UPI) touched a record high of Rs 27.28 lakh crore and 20.7 billion in value and volume terms, respectively, in October, according to data released by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI). In terms of value, the last highest recorded was Rs 25.14 lakh crore in May, while in terms of volume, the last high was 19.47 billion in July. NPCI said the value of transactions was at Rs 27.28 lakh crore in October against Rs 23.49 lakh crore in the same month a year ago, registering a 16 per cent growth on an annual basis. On a month-on-month basis, the growth was 9.5 per cent in terms of value. The UPI transaction in value terms was Rs 24.90 lakh crore, while volume was 19.63 billion. The average daily transaction in October was 668 million with an average value of Rs 87,993 crore during the festival month. "The steady rise in UPI volumes, particularly during high-traffic periods like Diwa

RBI has mandated two-factor authentication for all digital payments from April 2026, with guidelines allowing biometrics, tokenisation and risk-based checks alongside OTPs

Festive season demand lifted UPI volumes in August, while IMPS declined; FASTag and AePS posted strong gains, reflecting India's deepening digital payments adoption

Industry players add that while other monetisation-friendly avenues are emerging for UPI, those require to be developed further to offset the impact of free transactions

The 'collect request' feature allows UPI users to send a payment request to another person, say, to split a dinner bill or remind a friend to return borrowed money