Published Report | Catalysts (IFMR Lead) & PRICE

The outlook for digital payments in India is promising, which bodes well for broader financial inclusion through digital channels. Significant shifts have occurred in the policy & regulatory landscape as well as public infrastructure creation to enable a push from cash to digital. These changes have resulted in the opening of hundreds of millions of new bank accounts; an open API platform that supports paperless, presenceless and cashless transactions at scale; and new cohorts of small finance & payment banks with greater agility to drive banking & finance for underserved segments. At the same time, disruptive innovation in the private sector has galvanized a fast emerging fintech sector (enabled by open APIs), deeper smartphone penetration, and precipitous reductions in data costs. While this confluence of government and industry initiatives has led to a distinct rise in non-cash payments, this increase has so far been largely confined to certain new technologies and use cases.

This report by CATALYST and People Research on India’s Consumer Economy (PRICE) provides a deeper context on small business profiles, infrastructure, needs, behaviors, and perceptions. The hope is that such demand-side perspectives can better inform designers of interventions to increase uptake and usage of digital transactions. The following study focuses on small merchants with fixed establishments, which tend to be significantly more educated, economically empowered, and with greater access to digital infrastructure, compared to other longer tail merchant categories.

Principal Investigators: Badal Malick and Rajesh Shukla

Co-Investigators: Megha Shree and Vaisnavi Gnanasekaran

Supporting Research Team: Pratibha Joshi and Harsh Nisar