RBI to benchmark India's payment systems against global standards

In a move that will hopefully benefit retail consumers or users of India's payment methods, the RBI will be benchmarking our payment systems with those prevalent internationally. This study may be expected to lead to improvement in our systems and plugging of any lacunae vis-a-vis the systems in other countries.

In a statement today, the RBI said that efficient payment systems reduce the cost of exchanging goods and services and are indispensable to the functioning of financial markets. The past decade has witnessed several innovations in retail payments across the globe. Benchmarking India’s payment systems is necessary to gauge India’s progress against payment systems and instruments in major countries and give further impetus to the planned efforts for deepening the digitisation of payments.

A report containing the findings of such an exercise will be placed on the RBI website by the end of May 2019. In recent years, India's payment systems have also seen the emergence of new players in the PPI category such as mobile wallets, virtual cards etc.