IIT Madras begins better digital payment methods in India

The Faculty-led Mobile Payment Forum of India (MPFI) of the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT-M) requested for developing multilingual payment applications, customer support and grievance amendments in multiple Indian languages. This is an important component which will increase the inclusiveness and the reach of mobile and digital payment in the country. Presently, not all the official languages are offered as language options on the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) payment applications.

The MPFI which has played a crucial role in developing interoperability and security standards for the Immediate Payment Service (IMPS) and later on the UPI submitted the above-mentioned recommendations to the Chairman Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Committee Nandan Nilekani.

Dr. Gaurav Raina a faculty of IIT Madras was elected as the chairman of the MPFI, which is a joint initiative of the Institute for Development and Research in Banking Technology (IDRBT), Hyderabad and the Rural Technology Business Incubator (RTBI), IIT Madras. The MPFI which started in 2006 has a mission to enable mobile payments and mobile-based financial services accessible to everyone in India.

Prof Gaurav Raina while throwing light on the important aspects of the recommendations made to the RBI said that the MPFI recommendations considered three broad perspectives to strengthen the digital payment space and add confidence and trust to the Indian consumer. The three perspectives include User and Merchant perspectives, Regulation, methods and process, and standards for transactions through mediums like SMS.

Changes to be brought in

The changes to be brought about in the current online payment system have been pointed out. Voice should play an important role in the transaction part of the payment. This will increase usability and also reduce the transaction time. The forum also mentioned that for a certain fraction of citizens the present e-commerce symbols may be confusing which reduced their comfort level for conducting transactions online. Simple and easy steps for navigation and user-friendly interface which use speech rather than text will be helpful.

The important inputs given by users and merchants is to reduce the overall costs for merchants while designing the mobile applications in such a way that it is lightweight and minimizes the flow in order to reduce data usage. The need for clearly communicated guidelines for fees charged by the banks and payment operators for the different online payment services should also be available.

Furthermore, the MPFI has also called for all the stakeholders to work towards developing an ecosystem that helps the adoption of digital payments. These include developing open source designs for point of sale solutions (hardware and software) and book-keeping software.

Recommendations of Rules by MPFI

The MPFI has recommended that there should be clear and transparent guidelines on data sharing which will increase the trust among the consumers. There should also be an agency to certify financial applications and websites across the different security parameters.

Wider adoption of techniques from data science; machine learning and artificial intelligence should also be used across the payment industry. It is also recommended to have a greater awareness and also use techniques and developments from AI which are most suited for digital payments.

There should be an availability of features for recurring payments in UPI which will greatly increase the usage of the digital payment platform. The IT Act should also be reviewed for regulatory safeguards pertaining o data protection, storage and transmission.