Digital payments firm Visa partners with Innoviti Payment Solutions, India’s largest provider of payment solutions to offline enterprise merchants, to develop technology to improve reach of digital payments into small towns, as well as rural and remote areas.
The partnership will drive a proof of concept (POC) for offline payments in India that has executed by Innoviti in Bengaluru in partnership with Yes Bank and Axis Bank.
The offline payments technology will help improve reach of digital payments into small towns/ rural and remote areas and reduce dependency on internet for payments acceptance via chip-based Visa debit, credit, and prepaid cards even in places with low or no internet connectivity.
According to Innoviti, there are gaps in adoption of digital payments across smaller towns and rural pockets of the country due to infrastructural limitations. Offline payments technology helps merchants and, in turn, consumers can adopt digital payments, especially for micro-payments.
“Lack of internet connectivity has limited the democratisation of digital payment acceptance in the country, as all existing payment technologies need real-time connectivity for authentication and authorisation,” says Rajeev Agrawal, MD & CEO, Innoviti Payment Solutions, India.
“Transaction failures arising from low quality connectivity impact consumer and merchant confidence, further impeding digital payment acceptance. Offline payments are a fast, reliable, and low-cost way of solving this problem that can change the way payments happen. We are excited about partnering with Visa, Yes Bank and Axis Bank in this pilot.”
The Visa card
The chip in a new Visa debit card holds a stored value of a daily spend limit of INR2,000 and a per transaction limit of INR200. In the event of insufficient balance, the transaction will be declined.
“The pandemic’s unprecedented impact has spurred significant movement in the digital payments ecosystem,” said T.R. Ramachandran, group country manager, India and South Asia, Visa. “Visa aims to change the way we pay, and this POC is going to do just that. We also aim to work with more issuers to scale this solution across banks and their cardholders.”
Innoviti, which raised a Series C in 2020, also processes $10billion of annualised offline merchant payment volume (~ six per cent of India’s offline merchant volume, based on Reserve Bank of India data).
