The National Payments Corporation of India [NPCI] is pondering over the implementation of blockchain technology in an effort to strengthen digital transactions in the country, reported Business Today.
This initiative is being promoted by ten banks with backing from the Indian Banks Association [IBA] and it aims to become the “best payment network globally”. It is also an umbrella organization which runs retail payments and settlement systems in India and encompasses 56 national banks as stakeholders. Setup with the guidance and support of the Reserve Bank of India and the IBA, the NPCI will work on developing blockchain technology in the payment field to boost digital transactions. A notification from the NPCI read:
“NPCI intends to develop a resilient, real time and highly scalable blockchain solution. It is proposed to develop this solution using an open source technology/ framework/solution.”
The publication quoted a report of global consultancy firm PwC, which claimed that India would be one of the world’s blockchain leaders by 2023. Tarun Wig, the co-founder of Innefu Labs, said:
“Blockchain stores information about transactions between users in a way that can be tracked by any user for forever for maximum transparency. This gives visibility which can lead to greater efficiency by automating or confirming transactions and increasing liquidity in the supply chain.”
NPCI has successfully developed the Unified Payments Interface [UPI] payment system and is gaining traction in the country. The total payments shot up in March 2019 as compared to August 2016. The total payments in March were noted to be a whopping Rs 1.33 lakh crore, while in August 2016, it was Rs. 3.1 crore.
In July 2018, major banks from India and other BRICS nation, Brazil, Russia, China, and South Africa, had signed a Memorandum of Understanding for developing distributed ledger technology to enhance the digital economy.
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Published at Mon, 15 Apr 2019 21:42:14 +0000
