In recent years, India has moved to a leading position in digital payments and developed an ecosystem that enables the uptake and usage of digital payments. Many countries now seek to replicate India’s payments systems, particularly the Unified Payments Interface (UPI). This blog highlights the evolution of India’s payments landscape and looks into issues and ideas that contributed to this evolution. It briefly discusses the controversial waiver of the merchant discount rate (MDR) to increase the number of use cases in the person-to-merchant (P2M) category.

This is the first blog in a three-blog series on the whitepaper titled “How Digital Payments Drive Financial Inclusion in India. The series is built around the whitepaper, which provides evidence-backed insights on the evolution of digital payments in India and the current barriers and triggers for providers and users. It also covers critical use cases that can steer the shift toward digital payments for the mass market—and the concerted efforts needed from different stakeholders to make that shift possible.

India’s digital payments landscape has transformed dramatically over the past five years. This report, published in collaboration with the National Payments Corporation of India, provides a detailed outlook on India’s journey of digital payments, factors affecting the adoption of digital payments among the LMI segment, and products that have revolutionized the space.

Digital payments in India have grown phenomenally in the past decade. This report highlights how digital payments in the country grew and charts the path ahead. We look at the journey of digital payments in India, major events and entities that contributed to it, and products that revolutionized the digital payments space. We also identify barriers to the digital payments sector and analyze the future of digital financial inclusion through payments for the low- and moderate-income segments in India.

In this blog, we chart Mool’s journey. Mool is a neo bank that enables Indians in the low- and middle-income (LMI) segment to take small steps toward saving and investing. Read on to see how Mool uses an interactive, easy-to-use platform to make customers save more and plan their financial lives better. Mool is a startup under the Financial Inclusion (FI) Lab accelerator program’s fifth cohort. The FI Lab is supported by some of the largest philanthropic organizations worldwide—the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, J.P. Morgan, Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, MetLife Foundation, and Omidyar Network.

Kosh is a digital lending platform that provides access to formal credit to low- and middle-income (LMI) segments in India. It works on a joint liability model that relies on group leaders and members who avail credit through the platform. This blog explores the journey of Kosh and the positive impact it hopes to create on LMI segments.

How has the pandemic affected Indian FinTechs? What measures have the policymakers taken? Are these measures impactful for FinTechs? What are the investor sentiments for this sector? This report, the first in a series of ongoing Covid-19 research on Indian FinTechs and the Indian FinTech ecosystem by MSC, answers these questions in the current market’s context.

This blog is the second in this series and covers the AgTech landscape in India, illustrates AgTech offerings across the agri value chain, and highlights the three key challenges that limit their growth.