National Payments Corporation of India

National Payments Corporation of India

Type	Public Company
Industry	Finance
Founded	2008
Headquarters	Mumbai, Maharashtra, India[1]
Key people	AP Hota, Managing Director & CEO[2]
Products	National Financial Switch (NFS), Interbank Mobile Payment Service (IMPS), RuPay, Cheque Truncation System (CTS), Aadhaar Enabled Payment System (AEPS), ACH
Website	Official site

Reserve Bank of India, after setting up of the Board for Payment and Settlement Systems in 2005, released a vision document incorporating a proposal to set up an umbrella institution for all the RETAIL PAYMENT SYSTEMS in the country. The core objective was to consolidate and integrate the multiple systems with varying service levels into nation-wide uniform and standard business process for all retail payment systems. The other objective was to facilitate an affordable payment mechanism to benefit the common man across the country and help financial inclusion.

IBA's untiring efforts during the last three years helped turning this vision a reality. National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) was incorporated in December 2008 and the Certificate of Commencement of Business was issued in April 2009. It has been incorporated as a Section 25 company under Companies Act and is aimed to operate for the benefit of all the member banks and their customers. The authorized capital has been pegged at 300 crore (US$60.84 million) and paid up capital is 60 crore (US$12.17 million) so that the company can create infrastructure of large dimension and operate on high volume resulting payment services at fraction of the present cost structure.

NPCI would function as a hub in all electronic retail payment systems which is ever growing in terms of varieties of products, delivery channels, number of service providers and diverse Technology solutions.

NPCI has a mandate to create a domestic card scheme.The Brand name finalised for the same is RuPay. This scheme would be similar to domestic card schemes one of which is China UnionPay in China. China UnionPay (CUP) was a national agenda for a few years by mandating all domestic transactions to be routed through the national card system. Now China UnionPay cards are accepted in 26 countries. The card base is 1.8 billion. Bulk of the payments are made in China by CUP cards. Although it may not be possible to mandate such transaction flow in India, a domestic card is not a distant dream if all banks work in a co-operative framework. NPCI can reach the scale of China UnionPay by excelling in service quality and by placing the next generation products and services.

Vocalink in UK provides another benchmark for NPCI. Vocalink facilitates money transfer from any bank account to any other bank account in UK on a real time 24 x 7 basis. This implies that the experience of RTGS has been extended to retail payment segment. Now that more than 60,000 bank branches in the country are covered under Core Banking Solution, this is very much a feasible proposition in India and would be known as India MoneyLine.

NPCI would also benchmark against Bankserv in South Africa and KFTC in South Korea in terms of operational efficiency, reach across the country and range of products and services.

Organisation

Presently, there are ten core promoter banks (State Bank of India, Punjab National Bank, Canara Bank, Bank of Baroda, Union bank of India, Bank of India, ICICI Bank, HDFC Bank, Citibank and HSBC). The Board consists of Shri N. R. Narayana Murthy, Chairman, Infosys Technologies Ltd as the Chairman, Nominee from Reserve Bank of India, Nominees from ten core promoter banks and Shri A.P.Hota, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, NPCI. The Board for Regulation and Supervision of Payment and Settlement Systems (BPSS) at its meeting held on September 24, 2009 has approved in principle to issue authorisation to NPCI for operating various retail payment systems in the country and granted Certificate of Authorisation for operation of National Financial Switch (NFS) ATM Network with effect from 15 October 2009. NPCI has deputed its officials to IDRBT Hyderabad and NPCI has taken over NFS operations from 14 December 2009. Membership regulations and rules are being framed for enrolling all banks in the country as members so that when the nation-wide payment systems are launched, all would get included on a standardised platform.

A Technical Advisory Committee has also been constituted with two professors of IIT, Mumbai. Prof. N.L.Sarda is the Chairman and Prof. G.Sivakumar is the Co-Chairman of the Technical Advisory Committee. Members in this committees are drawn from banks at the level of Deputy General Manager/ Asst. General Manager.

Services

The corporation service portfolio now and in the future include:

• National Financial Switch(NFS)) which connects 83,648 ATMs of 61 banks (59 member+ 2 sub-member banks)
• Interbank Mobile Payment Service (IMPS) provided to 28 member banks which have registered more than 14 million customers
• Aadhaar-Enabled Payment System (AEPS) - A payment system for UID based transactions.
• RuPay - Domestic Card Scheme
• Cheque Truncation System (CTS)
• National ACH Service

References

1. ^ "National Payments Corporation of India". Npci.org.in. http://www.npci.org.in/contactus.aspx. Retrieved 2011-03-16. 
2. ^ "Mobile money transfer fee cut to 10p". Indianexpress.com. http://www.indianexpress.com/news/mobile-money-transfer-fee-cut-to-10p/762456/. Retrieved 2011-03-16. 

External links

• Official site
• CTCircular