Bangalore, mobile wallet opinion: There has been a lot of hype and enthusiasm by the Government of India, in promoting digital apps and other applications were the citizens can go digital. It has left no place in promoting the app like Narendramodi.in app to make each and every person living in India, more connected.

This is a good initiative, however the present government has failed to announce a official Government sponsored mobile wallet that the Indian people, the sellers and the buyers can easily trust upon.

Post demonetisation, our dependency of the mobile wallet like paytm has heavily increased. Though it is an India company, but if we see the funding history of the company as per Wikipedia, a lot of funding has been done from china as well.

Funding of paytm

Paytm was founded and incubated by One97 Communications in 2010 as a prepaid mobile recharge website. It can be seen that, In March 2015, Indian industrialist Ratan Tata made personal investment in the firm.  The same month, the company received a $575 million investment from Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba Group, after Ant Financial Services Group, an Alibaba Group affiliate, took 25% stake in One97 as part of a strategic agreement. Paytm borrowed 300cr from ICICI Bank in March 2016 as working capital.

Paytm processing:

My mobile, my bank, my wallet, NAMO urges youth to switch to e-banking, picture says the truth

Is the technology such as Paytm and SBI buddy a trap for the common man?

7 million transactions a day, worth over Rs 120 crores and RBI recently relaxed the limit on the amount of monthly transfer from walled o bank up to 50K.

Third party benefit:  

In all the transaction happening till now, currently the transaction fees of many wallets are reduced or not at all until the end of this year and may be for another couple of months, next year. However in future the companies can start charging service and other charges from the consumers since they cannot be always in loss.  And the question is not about PayTm or any other third party applications like JIO money, Airtel money or vodaphone M-pesa who is giving us benefit to do easy transaction. The question is why should the third party be benefited from the transaction we do, why not the government of India directly.

There is another issue here as well, the security.

SBI, Axis Bank wallet apps hacked to siphon off crores, in Jan 2016, City's cyber-crime police attached to the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) have arrested seven persons including a deputy manager with Axis bank's Peddapalli branch (Kareemnagar, Telangana) for allegedly hacking the wallet apps of Axis bankBSE -1.59 % (LIME) and State Bank of IndiaBSE -0.26 % (Buddy). (as per: http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/sbi-axis-bank-wallet-apps-hacked-to-siphon-off-crores/articleshow/50551158.cms)

People have to keep on pre planning their buying needs and have to top up this application over regular interval of time, this can be a headache over time. Having multiple wallet and keeping money in almost all the wallet based on different needs of the consumer. All the shops and all the people may not be using same type of payment system to do the transaction.

Apart from this there are different types of devices like windows based mobile phone, IOS based and android based. It can be really cumbersome to handle and use this apps and application. For example the cab service like Uber uses paytm, ola uses ola money and zipcash. Many of the wallets do not return your money immediately or they will park your money in their wallet to be used for other purpose. Like for example someone placed his/her order in Swiggy, and the restaurant do not have the items available as requested, then the cash is refunded only in the Swiggy wallet immediately, which can then be used to order food from the restaurants available with Swiggy, Which happens twenty four hour time period For “instant” refunds, and it takes 4-6 days for a proper refund. This means that your cash is not as flexible in your mobile wallet, as much as physical cash is in your real wallet.

Solution for above; One of the immediate solution for the above can be the unified payment system (UPI), however each bank has their own application. There has to be a common UPI which would be made available to the common public. Just like the Adhaar, some application must be initiated by the government of India, but not mandatory to implement the same payment system across.

Read article post demonetization

My mobile, my bank, my wallet, NAMO urges youth to switch to e-banking, picture says the truth

Is the technology such as Paytm and SBI buddy a trap for the common man?

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About The Author

Pravin Pathak is an Indian fact-checker and news writer, writing news for Ayupp since 2014.

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