NEW DELHI, February 27 (Reuters) – India’s conglomerate Reliance Industries, along with Facebook Inc, Google and fintech player Infibeam, has set up a national digital pay network, the Economic Times reported on Saturday, citing unnamed sources.
Last year, the Central Bank of India invited companies to forge new umbrella entities (NUEs) to create a payment network that would compete with the system operated by the National Payments Council of India (NPCI) because of the concentration risk. want to reduce in space.
NPCI was established in 2008 and is a non-profit company that has counted dozens of banks as its shareholders since March 2019, including the State Bank of India, Citibank and HSBC. It processes billions of dollars daily in payments through services that include interbank fund transfers, ATM transactions and digital payments.
Referring to three unnamed sources, India’s leading business magazine Economic Times said that the group led by Reliance and Infibeam was at the advanced stage of submitting their proposal to the Reserve Bank of India.
An Infibeam spokesman declined to comment on the report, saying the company was bound by the confidentiality of the process, while Reliance, Google and Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
According to an Assocham-PWC India study in 2019, digital payments could rise to $ 135.2 billion in 2023 in 2023.
Facebook and Google are already working with Reliance and their own interests in Jio Platforms – the unit that houses Reliance’s music, movie apps and telecommunications business.
The RBI this week extended the deadline for all parties to submit NUE applications to March 31 from February 26.
The report says that RBI is expected to take another six months to study all the proposals submitted, and that it is expected that there will be no more than two new NUE licenses for a for-profit organization.
The RBI did not respond to a request for comment.
Earlier media reports said other parties included a group led by Amazon and ICICI Bank; another combination led by the country’s salt-to-software conglomerate Tata Group and private lender HDFC Bank; and a company with India’s largest mobile payment platform, Paytm, local partner Ola and IndusInd Bank. (Posted by Manoj Kumar Editing by Clelia Oziel)