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Wrestling with the 'water balloon' of digital payments

Catalyst, an Indo-US project, seeks to break fresh ground by focusing on interoperability

Badal Malick, Catalyst, CEO
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Catalyst Chief Executive Officer Badal Malick makes a presentation to partners.

N Sundaresha Subramanian New Delhi
Soft launching the initiative at a conference organised by the Better Than Cash Alliance and Observer Research Foundation here in October, Catalyst Chief Executive Officer Badal Malick described the digital payments sector as a ‘water balloon’, in which “you apply pressure on one side, something else pops up on the other.”

Therefore, the goal was to address the ecosystem as a whole and outlining his broad plan added, “Take an ecosystem and demonstrate something like 10x increase in digital payments and build a template that can be scaled across.”

Over the past three months, Malick and his team of about