Bharat (India) QR Payments

Some basic stats on India ....

“only about 15 percent of that population report ever having used a bank account in their entire lives.”

"there are 155,000 bank branches in that nation, but 600,000 towns and cities" CEO of MobileonMoney

"there are currently fewer than 20 cash machines for every 100,000 adults in India"
"there are about 57.7 million merchants in India but only 1.5 million digital payment acceptance locations" PYMNTS.com
The story basically is about the cost of POS terminals (think of the MasterCard/Nigeria story).  These are needed for card-based payments (traditional & NFC).

One way to avoid POS costs is to take advantage of phones (I am assuming smartphones - or at least any phone which can take a picture/scan).

So the merchant has a  QR code (printed on a piece of paper say) with a merchant ID - the customer scans the QR code and initiates a push payment on their phone using Visa/MasterCard/RuPay debit/credit. So maybe the country will skip plastic cards altogether? And of course this only works for with with bank accounts.  More here.



Talk to my hand

Apparently Fujitsu introduced palm vein biometrics (vascular recognition) in Japan in 2004 and this is widely used in ATMs in Japan.  Here is an interesting example from one of the early adopters - a Scottish school.  The technology is also being used at GMAT test centers.  Soon I hope we can dispense with cards and mobile phones for payments and just use our hands.  Here is a POS solution from PulseWallet.

World Payments Report

Thanks to Fenny for this.  This is the 2013 report.  Please do have a look and read beyond the summary of the results.  The good (or bad) thing about data is that it can be interpreted in more than one way.

So despite the high growth rates for emerging market economies, rich countries dominate in non-cash payments (volume) and are likely to continue to do so.  Expect to see new innovations coming out of rich countries.  Cards are also quite dominant (though debit is growing faster than credit), so it is unlikely that a new entrant can ignore the incumbents.  If they treat card companies as complementors, the dominance of cards is likely to continue for the foreseeable future. Banks also continue to be dominant players in the M-Payments market.

Also, expansion (and investment) is taking place is less regulated markets.  This is also not surprising for two reasons.  First, new technology roll-outs are like the gold rush.  Initially everyone is just trying to grab some real estate so they can dig for gold - once too many people start doing that there is encroachment - people start worrying about property rights ... putting up fences ... hiring guards etc.  That is the time when industry goes to government and asks for regulation.  The second reason is just that companies like to play the regulatory arbitrage game.  PayPal is a good example - in Luxembourg the company is registered as a bank only because the regulations allow it.  In other markets with more stringent regulation, they could just be a money transfer company.  So they are just playing whatever game the regulations allow them to play.

Yet PayPal is disingenuous enough to lobby APEC/ASEAN etc. for harmonization of regulations.  I suspect it may be a good idea to decide what you do (or don't do) before you ask for the same rules across countries.  And in any case, the way the world is headed, harmonization is a bit of a pipe dream for the tech sector.  Privacy laws and data protection laws vary quite substantially across countries and the Snowdon revelations are going to increase variance across countries.  So dis-harmonization is where we are headed. It is for this reason that Microsoft has decided to allow local storage of data ... in other words every country can have its own cloud ... even small ones.  Which really makes no sense since the cloud is all about scale.  But perhaps it's a recognition of the sociopolitical reality in which business must be conducted.