- Mr. C. K. Vardharajan, Vice President, Equitas Small Finance Bank
- Ms.Priyanka Subhadarsini, Payments Business Analyst, Standard Chartered GBS
- Mr.Vishwas Patel, Director Infibeam Avenues Limited, Founder CCAvenue Payment Gateway
- Mr. Jitendra Gupta, Founder Citrus Pay & MD Pay U, India
- Mr. Muthu Krishnan, General Manager- Merchant Acquisition at India Transact Services Ltd
- Ms. Swati Pandey, Manager-(UPI,IMPS,BHIM) NPCI
- Mr. Sunil Kulkarni, Joint Managing Director, Oxigen Services (India) Pvt Ltd
- Mr. Vishweshwaran R, Vice President Business Technology Group – IDFC First Bank
- Mr. Milind Satpute, VP Product Development, Mosambee – Synergistic Financial Networks
- Mr. Vikas R Panditrao, Co-Founder, Forum of Industry and Academic Knowledge Sharing (FIAKS)
- Many other CEO/CXO Bankers & Fintech professionals on FIAKS Forum requested to remain anonymous
“If the largest lender SBI has its way, it may herald the beginning of the end of the ubiquitous debit cards from the banking system as the bank plans to promote more digital payment solutions and eliminate the need of plastic cards.”
State Bank of India has decided to start eliminating their customers debit cards in order to encourage and increase digital payments medium all across India but What does the closure of debit card business mean to the payments companies, Banks & UPI based companies? This is one of the major concerns of our FIAKS community members. What SBI wants to do instead is to shift the focus from older methods and technologies of banking to the newer ones which is why in the future SBI customers will have to use the YONO app, an app created especially for digital banking services to withdraw cash out of an ATM instead of the plastic card.
The State Bank of India as we all know is a Government Corporation and a Fortune 500 company with more than 24,000 branches, over 59,000 ATM’s that serve more than 42 crore customers and their spread out in nearly 36 countries with their major focus is on the less fortunate and the underprivileged people of our society. If SBI’s focus is centered on the less fortunate then what we do need to understand here is that a major chunk of those parts of our country are living without a smartphone and if so then How is it possible to create a digital payment environment without the usage of smartphones?
Majority of the people from the different classes of society heavily rely on the usage of debit cards on a daily basis on the other hand also UPI can be only used by customers who have issued a debit card in the first place. What happens to companies who are enabling UPI based payments? and Is this the reason Paytm numbers are declining on UPI as they’re aware of such a move?
Plus what will happen to the Point of Sale (PoS) and card manufacturers? These are questions that SBI will have to ponder upon.
The truth also is that nothing will work if there is no mobile data network or landline connectivity in households and SBI is the largest brand in ATM’s today. If there are no debit cards, of what use will ATM’s be and also not many SBI customers make use of mobile banking let alone the usage of YONO (SBI’s digital banking platform) for withdrawing cash. Until and unless YONO is 100% implemented across all customer segments, customer base, one cannot do away with debit cards. “It may take at least a decade,” says experts, paper-based cheques are still around so don’t you think cards have a long way to go? SBI chairman isn’t wrong with wanting to create such advancement in banking but it only seems to be way ahead of its time.
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