 Today I have with me a fantastic bunch of leaders in the digital payment space to say that they have they're representing the top companies in India would be an understatement. Today's discussion is largely going to be about what digital payments infrastructure change, the revolution, the evolution has done for this country the opportunities that exist. I can't even begin to tell you what lies ahead but we are going to discuss about what has happened and the opportunities for businesses as well as business owners such as you that are present today how these opportunities are now evolving. So we have I can let everybody very very quickly just say one line about their company and themselves so that you can relate with them better and then we'll start the discussion. Tanya, I'll let you do the talking. Thanks and good morning to everybody. It's truly an honour to be in a part of this panel among such esteemed speakers and lovely to see all of you here. My name is Tanya. I work for PayPal. PayPal as you know is one of the oldest financial payments company. It's present in over 200 countries 100 plus currencies. We serve over 18 million merchants and 270 million consumers worldwide and I work for the payments team in India. Thank you. Hi my name is Ashneer. I'm the founder of this company Bharatpe. At Bharatpe we put out UPI QR codes at long-tail merchants. So basically what we are trying to do is you know promote mobile payments using UPI at offline retail. Hi everyone. My name is Vikas Pansal. I head of financial services and new payments within Amazon Pay. What Amazon Pay is, we are on a mission to make it the most convenient and rewarding way to pay and get 100% digital payments penetration in India and we as you know we work very closely with Amazon Marketplace as well as all other leading merchants now in India. Hello everyone. I am Puneet Jain. I built and lead online merchant payments at Paytm. Paytm of course is a marketer in this space and I consider myself fortunate to be part of this journey for last five years. Hi everyone. I am Akash. I'm founder of Cashree. Cashree is a payment technology startup. So we help businesses collect payments online and disperse money at scale. Our focus has been you know to build a right infrastructure and start for businesses in India and we are moving in that direction like you know one day at a time. Thanks Akash. Thanks everybody for having me here today. Good morning. My name is Rohit and I lead Payoneer in India. Payoneer is a cross-border B2B payments platform which largely means that any person who has a business wants to export whether goods or services and wants to collect money across various currencies, various countries. We offer them a seamless platform to do it at one go. That's what Payoneer does. But the first thing that comes to mind when we talk about digital payments story in India so far is the way the government as well as the way the players in the ecosystem have transitioned payments infrastructure from before to now, how they've digitized it and how it is helping both the business side as well as the consumer side. I'm going to take my first question with Vikas. You know Amazon Pay today is one of the interesting formats that are coming in. We know that, I'll take it from ATM also, we know that demonetization led to this influx of consumers getting onto the digital platform. They were forced to it and now I think they enjoy it. I want to know from you how well do you think international companies like Amazon will be able to position themselves in India. Before we understand the India story, I want to know what the foreign players are thinking. Sure. So one thing I want to say is that we are an Indian company run by Indians, though we have investors that are foreign investors. So right, we are absolutely run by Indians in India. In terms of Amazon Pay, you know, as you know, Amazon globally works really backwards from the customer. So it is all about, you know, what customer needs and pain points are and can we develop solutions that can really meet and meet those needs. And this is what we are on a mission and then what we are thinking through is when it comes to payments, payments is a very vast space, right? It impacts every industry, you know, from any retail to everything it covers. And then because of that reach, we cannot force fit one payment method on the customer. Customer needs to have the choice of payment methods. So that is why we are saying if customer is a credit card user, we want to offer them a credit card. If the customer has bank payments, they want to do, we want to do UPI, we want to debit cards, we want to offer all suite of solutions, you know, so that the customers have a choice. And then the other thing we are saying is that we in India, we are realizing is that, you know, because of this such a small penetration of digital payments that we really need to create that habit, right? And it is really, really early days. And I think for all of us here, there is so much opportunity to really penetrate and all of us will win and the customers will win as well when we really grow this space. And this requires a lot of collaboration and partnership with each other, with banks, with new fintech companies. And that's how we are thinking about it. The great part about partnerships, the one that Vikas mentioned, is the multiple partnerships that can be established by the ATM to facilitate businesses as well as consumers. How has the digital story changed for the ATM in the last one year? And how are you looking to actually take this digital revolution ahead in terms of payments? Because as Vikas mentioned from the consumer choice, from a debit card to whether using a wallet or whether using another format of access of payment, is something that I'm sure something like yours is closely looking at. Sure. So first allow me to break the digital payment system from the perspective of customers and merchants so that we understand where the opportunity lies for ATM and everyone else. So typically the way we see it, there is a financial account which is a typical savings account, a current account or a wallet or a credit which customer uses for a source of funds. Then we have a form factor which is like a method or a medium which customers use to complete transactions. So your card, your cash is actually a form factor and then mobile which has emerged to be the biggest form factor which everyone and then followed by acceptance infrastructure on the merchant side which traditionally used to be an ADC machine where customers can come and swipe cards or your payment gateway in the online parlance and now we have the things like QR codes which are far more ubiquitous and far more scalable. So what we have done at ATM and I think this is what all industry leaders are also trying to do is figure out opportunities of innovation in this value chain. So probably with wallet what we did was leverage mobile as a medium to reach out to a large number of users which possibly couldn't have been done from time to time and we created something like account organization to create a seamless consumer experience. Then happened UPI another huge outcome of individual payments story. It further build a mobile first payment method which which which leverages the fact that everyone of us are carrying smartphones and this market is only growing from here. So and similarly on the infrastructure acceptance science we created QR codes which allowed us to reach out to the large number of SMEs and micro merchants spread across the country in a much more scalable and economically feasible way. So essentially there are a lot of innovation happening in this second and third layer. First layer is more or less regulated so we are gradually low gradual in nature but what wallets and UPI have done is democratize the payment system for everybody. So now everybody outside banks which are earlier custodians of payment system can come up and set up their consumer facing platforms, create consumer accounts and dip into these payment methods and start building consumer friendly, business friendly payment mechanism. So this has been according to me the the real changes over last few years and I think at ATM will continue to focus on these opportunities further improve consumer experience. Talking about consumer first mobile first and also innovation in your experience what has worked the best for consumers and where do you think the positioning today has to be for a company like yours? See cash phase is a B2B company but our aim has always been to help businesses provide best experience to the customers. So with the rise in digital payments customers have been able to pay you know pay for their orders quickly. If I can scan a QR code or scan the ATM QR code money leaves my account like you know within five seconds or ten seconds. When it comes to refunds then customers have always been to know wait for seven days, ten days to get the money back and there has always been discontent among the customers they always come back saying you debit my money instantly but you take like ten days to give the money back. So there we focus primarily on working with merchants to help them you know ease these kind of payment methods. So be it like you know sending the refund faster to the customer or paying wage for your on-demand service provider or paying to your customer for the rewards you know on the website like cashback and all. So this cannot be solved just by making this easier for the customer the entire experience. The customer experience also depends on what businesses are using. If businesses are not in the right to the customer experience will suffer at some point of time because we have to see the entire you know life cycle as experienced not just the payment part. So we come like you know at the other side of the you know the code and we try to improve things from that beginning. I feel that businesses today have a lot more choice than what they had before in terms of the payment gateways of course wallets are not the only platforms available and how much can businesses really you know make their offering better because digital payment specifically payments is a very very unique and personalized consumer experience and it affects the business in a large way. You're right and I think if I had to kind of take the Uber level approach of what does this mean and by forget this there are actually many things that have happened in digital payments and some of these have driven many more benefits just beyond you know making the money move from cash to non-cash methods of payment and some of the drivers here and I would like to talk about some value drivers are things like India stack right so you have Aadhar in it you have UPI in it bunch of things that are there in it right. What has that made possible is a cashless layer of course which we talk about a presence less layer they talk about consent where you know if you look at Europe for example they're talking about GDPR now but we came up with a consent layer much much earlier where we wanted the user actually to participate with the business both as a consumer and a business to make it completely you know a pull mechanism if you look back at how developed economies are people were very much you know economically rich before they were data rich so it was you bought a mobile phone here you can now buy a case cover for it you bought a television please you know take Tata Sky for it or whatever the other benefits was it was advertising led. In India we are now much more data rich because of digitalization then we are economically rich India's PPP is probably one 20th of that of say US right so users in India will have the choice of pull they will be able to select what they want today if my as a business my my rating is much higher than anyone else's because I have a very strong business my customers like my products they like the service that I offer I can go to any provider whether it's a bank or a fintech and ask for a finance or a loan which is at a much lower rate because I know the value of my data right so that's changed at cashless or digitalization is driving even as I talk about lending which is another element in that probably most of the transactions when it happened at a merchant level were cash there was never a trace so if I combine you know digitalization and GST there is now a trace so today or earlier when I had to borrow from money lenders at probably you know 24 30 60 APRs I can now go to organized capital providers and borrow at a much lower rate so these are the value drivers that are getting done in the system and that's something which is over and about just the form factor of which Puneet spoke about which are really you know big things that are happening and I guess bunch of things on the consumer side also that are happening in terms of EMI and stuff like that which probably you know or Amazon can touch upon but overall pretty exciting times for us to see these new developments happen and overall improvements that we see in the way things are getting done everything happens digitally but how do you bring also to digital stores? Do you feel that UPI could be the game-changer there and do you think that are using UPI and they are also in the position pivot themselves better facilitated by this payment? Yeah so UPI is a very big game-changer as far as I think in the market because up till now what is happening is that if you are learning about payments basically is that you have to take money from one person and give it to the other and the payment company in the middle is sitting with their own tooling that I will take 2% in the middle I think that is the biggest disservice which happens in the payment industry because technically if you give money to an individual or give business to an individual there is no difference in computing and technology after UPI there is no difference so if I am giving money to a friend of 3000 rupees or I am giving it to a shopkeeper of 3000 rupees then why is that shopkeeper spending 60 rupees in it and after UPI I feel that the biggest change can happen and you know as payments companies I will have to change you a little or take the mind of tooling the simple thing is that if someone gives you a note of 2000 rupees and your hand also gets a note of 2000 rupees and that is why the retailer is happy with the cash he doesn't care about the white-black he also knows that he is going to do business in white but he knows that if I swipe cards to buy payments or I am doing a QR then it cuts from 1.5 to 2.5 that is why he has a hitchhike so I think the biggest change that is going to come fundamentally is that the P2P payments and P2M payments the difference is going to end and technically the difference is going to end only when you say that it is payment free for merchants that means that as a payment company you will get an entry in the shop what do you make of the business and you have to think that the tooling business has gone today's retailer is also very understanding he knows that if I am giving 2% my margin of 6% then I am giving 25% profit to payment companies I am earning that of course a lot of exports and other activities are done via PayPal very significant for businesses today to understand that why are they paying that 2% extra which actually he was mentioning to the payments company until now the discussion was that there is no other way around but do you see that there is another way around and do you think that payment gateways and payment companies are actually rethinking their business model to be able to facilitate this merchant who wants to make use of this evolved thought of course and I think more than payment companies there is so much policy work that has gone into making the entire payment system affordable in itself I want to tell you when I started my career as a banker I used to handle cash management cash being the operator word for a large telecom company and I used to get calls on a daily basis from 5 or 7 collection heads asking me whether the check has been picked up whether the cash has been picked up sometimes I used to get frantic calls on the fact that someone was held at gunpoint and the cash man actually was stolen and those kind of things used to make me always wonder and used to ask the collections team as to why is it that consumers are not adapting to electronic payments and back then IMPS had just taken off wallets was of course picking up steam in the market and the team used to constantly tell me what it is easy for the consumer to walk into a store pay by check pay by cash it's nice to have a receipt at the end of the day and it is also nice to know that my payment is secured with a receipt and I can close a lot of disputes I can close a lot of enquiries while I am at the store they did mention that yeah we do have digital payments at that point of time but it was an idea whose time had not yet come and for the merchant which is the likes of a telecom company who of course have a lot more margins to talk through at that point of time and for small and medium scale merchants I think the biggest repellent for digital payments was the cost of actually acquiring a transaction and then of course we had a watershed moment post which a lot of things came together there was a seamless partnership that we saw across payment companies, banks, technology companies and policy makers who worked towards creating a framework which was truly I think world class way ahead of its time we had UPI which was nothing but an abstraction of a bank account and an ID then you had OpenAPIs which made it possible for companies like us to facilitate fund transfers in spite of not being in banking it was affordable it was cheap because the regulator made it possible in a way where those payments were subsidized for merchants and for consumers alike and that's where it kind of led towards so I think so much work has happened we do have a lot more to conquer but as a consumer if we focus on the three things that you know we heard back then which was convenience, safety, security and the assurance that you know while it's still digital there is a human touch available and for merchants we need to make sure that you know the infrastructure is cheap and costly for the people that's that's my take on it