Google, Walmart Help Drive India Payments Past 1 Billion Transactions (bloomberg.com) 8
Saritha Rai, writing for Bloomberg: A payments platform created by India's largest retail banks surpassed a billion transactions in October, a milestone that affirms the tremendous growth of services offered by U.S. giants from Walmart to Amazon.com and Google. Indian digital payments took off when the government pushed demonetization in 2016, invalidating most of the country's high-value currency notes in a move to curb corruption and push Indians away from cash. The Unified Payments Interface or UPI has now surpassed a 100 million users three-and-a-half years after its launch, thanks to booming smartphone use and wireless data rates among the lowest in the world. Amazon and Google now vie with local startup Paytm, Walmart-PhonePe and a host of other players in a digital payments market forecast to quintuple to $1 trillion by 2023. "UPI has had the fastest acceptance rate not just among payment platforms but digital platforms of any kind," said Dilip Asbe, chief executive officer of the National Payments Corporation of India, which groups the lenders that developed the system. "We aim to expand the UPI base to 500 million users in the next three years."
UPI sports an open architecture allowing digital wallet apps, payment banks and startups to link freely to its platform. That's a contrast to the closed systems of China's dominant services, WeChat and Alipay. It simplifies transactions between apps and banks linked through a biometric ID system called Aadhaar. Regulated by the central bank, it allows the instant transfer of funds between bank accounts through a mobile device using a simple virtual handle, without sharing bank or personal details. UPI's creators now want to take the platform beyond the country's borders and allow payments in places like Singapore or the Middle East with a dense population of Indian expatriates.
UPI sports an open architecture allowing digital wallet apps, payment banks and startups to link freely to its platform. That's a contrast to the closed systems of China's dominant services, WeChat and Alipay. It simplifies transactions between apps and banks linked through a biometric ID system called Aadhaar. Regulated by the central bank, it allows the instant transfer of funds between bank accounts through a mobile device using a simple virtual handle, without sharing bank or personal details. UPI's creators now want to take the platform beyond the country's borders and allow payments in places like Singapore or the Middle East with a dense population of Indian expatriates.
Transnational cashless (Score:2)
Bullshit propagana, if there ever was any. (Score:3)
This is solely and exclusively about complete totalitarian surveillance of all and any transaction whatsoever.
I know this is a hard sell to Americans, who think "cashless" is a good thing,
but real money is real money.
And a number somewhere on a server is not real money.
Especially when it is at the whim of a bunch of greedy sleazebag who can make up new rules any day, depending on the weather and amount of anxiety disorder that day.
And who wants to suddenly ban Wikileaks or harass you with a credit system based on if you have been a good obedient drone.
People in India will probably just start trading valuable goods and services again.
1h of work will alway be worth 1h of equivalent work. A goat or bag of rice will always stay being n meals. You can trade with gift certificates. And there are other countries' currencies too.
Still, this is Monsanto or Goldman Sachs level evilness, dear Google. I guess they originally meant to type "Do 'mo evil.".
Re:Bullshit propagana, if there ever was any. (Score:5, Insightful)
I know this is a hard sell to Americans, who think "cashless" is a good thing,
but real money is real money.
Just wait until wildfires get to where you are, or other tragedies strike, and the power is out. Then see how much they like the cashless society. Here in California some people are learning this lesson the hard way. Sheriff's departments (&c) are suggesting that people hit the ATM and withdraw cash ahead of power outages so that they can buy necessities during those periods.
No, it isn't (Score:2)
No, it's not about "surveillance". It's about money. 3% skimmed off of the top of everything that people buy is a FUCKTON of money. People who don't pay credit card merchant fees themselves never think about how much credit card processing costs.
Re: (Score:2)
Seems to me people were saying the same thing when paper money first appeared - "That's not real money. It's just a "banknote . REAL money is gold and silver coin."
Of course, before there was gold and silver coin, it was a weight of gold/silver measured with honest scales.
What I hear when someone says "cashless is not real money" is "this isn't how they did it in the good old days. And get off my lawn, you kids!"
Re: (Score:2)
What I hear when someone says "cashless is not real money" is "this isn't how they did it in the good old days. And get off my lawn, you kids!"
It's no more or less real than bank notes, but it's definitely easier to track its use, and it's going to be much harder to use it to make purchases not approved by the government. As long as victimless acts are criminal, it is first and foremost a tool of fascism. It's also a shit idea because it doesn't work in a power outage, making you more dependent on your government for everything. Do you want to be reliant on your local government for food, water and shelter? Or worse, FEMA?
Re: (Score:1)
digital payment (Score:1)