Better technology, offers and discounts on Visa and Mastercard are taking Bengaluru cardholders away from RuPay
Rohit uses debit cards extensively. He has a Visa card, one from Mastercard and one issued by RuPay. Recently, he has stopped using the last one. He is not alone. The number of RuPay cards issued in Bangalore over the past few months has come down.
Ashwini Raju, manager at State Bank of India, Kengeri, said that a recent report of RBI Regional Office, Bengaluru showed that against around 20,000 new RuPay cards issued previously, only 5000 have been issued in the past few months.
Rohit stopped using RuPay cards because transactions failed often, especially if they were slightly large ones. “In the case of transactions above Rs. 10,000 the payment gateway of the National Payments Corporation in India (NPCI) for RuPay gets stuck very often. It happens a lot of the times that the amount gets debited and the transactions shows as failed,” he said. On the other hand, he said, “Transactions which are above Rs. 10,000 are usually very easy to do with Visa and Mastercard.”
He has reported this problem many times to the bank but except for sympathy and apology, he has not received any recourse. He has even lodged a complaint on the Reserve Bank India (RBI) ombudsmen portal.
Banks across the city have received more applications for Visa and Mastercard cards instead of RuPay card.A manager at a public-sector bank in Kengeri said, “RuPay is using domestic payment gateway system. The servers of NPCI are located in different cities. Depending on the location of the transaction, the server detects the amount and finds the nearest database of the user. If the database doesn’t respond, the transaction fails .”
He added that the other possibility why people are opting for more Visa and Mastercard could be the additional benefits to the cardholders. The benefits which are included are free airport lounge access, cashback, free and exclusive offers, discounts and special deals for the customers not only in domestic but in other countries also. While for RuPay card holders there are limited benefits.
Parikshit Govind, retired banker from Indian Bank said “RuPay has a weak payment gateway, very basic user interface and very poor servers. People expect competitive, convenient and better benefits from payment gateway platforms.”
He added that every bank has their uniquely designed payment gateway system with RuPay but the back end algorithm of RuPay has a lot of bugs.”
Abhas, IT developer in DxMinds, Bengaluru, said that RuPay payment gateway platform is so weak that its source code can be altered by any hacker. It is possible that NPCI doesn’t have adequate resources to make the platform secure and easy navigable for the customers.
RuPay is an Indian multinational financial service payment network launched by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) in the year 2012. It is an initiative by the National Payment Corporation of India’s (NPCI) to boost retail payments in India. RuPay was launched with the objective of a less cash economy. It is derived from the words “rupee” and “payment”, which highlights that it is India’s approach to virtual card (Vcard) payments.
A RuPay debit card is a plastic card used as a method of payment issued by a bank to their account holders. It has wide acceptance at any point of sale (POS) devices, automated teller machines (ATMs) and e-commerce platforms. RuPay is India’s entry into the international payment market.
