Doing away with charge levied on merchants may hurt PoS machines deployment

The Budget proposed that businesses with annual turnover of more than Rs 50 crore shall offer low-cost digital modes of payment to their customers

On August 5, a delegation of people drawn from the deployers of the country’s point-of-sale (PoS) machines will call upon senior officials in North Block to give vent to their heartburn — the move to do away with the merchant discount rate (MDR) in the Union Budget. 

The MDR is the charge levied upon merchants every time you transact through the ubiquitous PoS. It is, in turn, shared by the participants in the eco-system which runs this business —issuers, acquirers, the networks (Visa, Mastercard and RuPay), and non-bank deployers. We are talking basis points (bps) here — on a debit card