Mobile Wallets make Hay when the Sun is still shining!

Hello there!! 

 An update on the Demonetization crisis.

As per news reports, the government has directed that about 2 lakh micro-ATMs should be put into operation to tide over the demonetization crisis facing the country. It has directed to banks to activate nearly 1.1 lakh such ATMs in rural areas and nearly 90,000 in urban and semi-urban areas. There are nearly 70,000 transactions being conducted on Aadhaar enabled micro-ATMs every week and  the government is hoping that this will reduce  stress on the bank branches and ATM network. 

The government has also increased the cash holding limit of business correspondents to Rs 50,000 and these representatives will now be allowed to withdraw cash multiple times as opposed to only once a day earlier. The government is planning to make all ration (PDS) shops as business correspondents which are about 5.5 lakh in India.

The government said that they had feedback from constituencies, which suggest people have supported demonetisation overwhelmingly. The government urged their allies and supporters to make the currency move a huge success , and at the same time ruling out any roll back of the demonetization drive.

Meanwhile, Mobile wallet companies have registered a sharp increase in their business and they are making their transactions free.  Earlier, transferring money from a mobile wallet to the bank would see a levy of 4 per cent fee for a non-KYC user and one per cent for a KYC user.

Mobikwik a mobile wallet company has  said it has registered 18-fold growth in transactions since the announcement of demonetization that saw old Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes ceasing to be legal tender.   Users can load money into their m-wallets using their credit/debit cards or net banking.

Paytm, a mobile payments and commerce platform, today said it has touched a record number of payment transactions at 5 million and is on the way to process over Rs 24,000 crore. It said that the  number of transactions per user also went up from 3 transactions to over 18 transactions in a week.

According to an ASSOCHAM-RNCOS joint study  titled “Indian M-wallet market”  the mobile payment transaction volume is likely to register a compounded growth rate of over 90 per cent to reach 153 billion by FY22 as against a meager 3 billion transactions in FY16. It said the  Mobile payment transaction value in India is also likely to register over 150 per cent CAGR and cross Rs 2,000 trillion by FY22 from just over Rs 8 trillion as of FY16. 

Nepal has asked for help in resolving the problem of  Nepalese holding a huge stock of banned high denomination Indian bank notes and for  swapping  them with legal currency in the country. The Nepal Rastra Bank (NRB), the central bank of Nepal , also banned the use of those bank notes in Nepal from last Wednesday.

The NRB has said INR 33.6 million in the denominations of 500 and 1,000 is within the financial system in Nepal, including cash parked at vaults of banks, financial institutions, and NRB. Actual stock of banned Indian bank notes is expected to be much more because Nepalese were  allowed to carry Indian worth up to IRs25,000 . Those residing in areas bordering India usually stash Indian notes of larger denominations as they have to frequent Indian markets to buy goods.

C.H. Venkatachalam, General Secretary, All India Bank Employees' Association (AIBEA) told IANS on Tuesday that "I may have to review the cooperation extended to the demonetization efforts if the employees are put to undue stress and difficulty. There is a limit to elasticity,".

He ridiculed the idea of putting indelible ink on people exchanging invalid notes so as to prevent them coming a number of times. He said   there should be a software/technological solution rather than the indelible ink such that once the data is fed into a bank branch system it should get reflected in the systems of all other bank branch computer terminals."

Meanwhile, BJP chief Amit Shah launched a counter-attack on the Congress accusing it off siphoning off 12 lakh crore by various scams like 2g,CWG, coal scam,Adarsh society aircraft purchase etc.during its rule at the center.