National Payments Corporation of India
 | |
| Section 8 Company | |
| Industry | Finance |
| Founded | 2008 |
| Headquarters | Mumbai, Maharashtra, India[1] |
Key people | AP Hota, managing director & CEO[2] |
| Products | National Financial Switch (NFS), Immediate Payment Service (IMPS), RuPay, Cheque Truncation System (CTS), Aadhaar Enabled Payment System (AEPS), ACH |
Number of employees | 496 |
| Website | Official site |
Reserve Bank of India, after setting up of the Board for Payment and Settlement Systems in 2005, released a vision document incorporating a proposal to set up an umbrella institution for all the RETAIL PAYMENT SYSTEMS in the country. The core objective was to consolidate and integrate the multiple systems with varying service levels into nation-wide uniform and standard business process for all retail payment systems. The other objective was to facilitate an affordable payment mechanism to benefit the common man across the country and help financial inclusion.
National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI, Hindi: भारतीय राष्ट्रीय भुगतान निगम) was incorporated in December 2008 and the Certificate of Commencement of Business was issued in April 2009. The company, which has been incorporated as a Section 25 company under The Companies Act 1956, is now under Section 8 of The Companies Act, 2013. The formation of NPCI is aimed to operate for the benefit of all the member banks and their customers. The authorised capital has been pegged at 
3 billion (US$48 million) and paid up capital is 600 million (US$9.5 million) so that the company can create infrastructure of large dimension and operate on high volume resulting payment services at fraction of the present cost structure.
NPCI would function as a hub in all electronic retail payment systems which is ever growing in terms of varieties of products, delivery channels, number of service providers and diverse Technology solutions. NPCI is now certified for three standards – PCI-DSS (sensitive data security in payment systems), ISO27001 (information security) and ISO 22301 ( business continuity) apart from ISO 9001( Quality Management).
NPCI has successfully completed the major project of developing a domestic card payment network called- RuPay. RuPay card payment system symbolizes the capabilities of banking industry in India to build a card payment network so that dependency on international card schemes is minimized. The RuPay card is now accepted at all the ATMs (1,84,331+), PoS terminals (10,00,000+) and most of the eCom merchants (10,000+) in the country. A variant of the card called ‘Kisan Card’ is now being issued by all the Public Sector banks in addition to the mainstream debit card which has been issued by 43 banks. More than 200 Cooperative banks and the Regional Rural Banks (RRBs) in the country have also issued RuPay ATM card. More than 75 million cards are being issued by various banks, and it is growing at a rate of about 3 million per month.
RuPay scheme is similar to world's many domestic card schemes, one of which is China UnionPay in China. China UnionPay (CUP) was a national agenda for a few years by mandating all domestic transactions to be routed through the national card system. Now China UnionPay cards are accepted in 26 countries. The card base is 1.8 billion. Bulk of the payments are made in China by CUP cards. Although it may not be possible to mandate such transaction flow in India, a domestic card is not a distant dream if all banks work in a co-operative framework. NPCI can reach the scale of China UnionPay by excelling in service quality and by placing the next generation products and services.
Organisation
Presently, there are ten core promoter banks (State Bank of India, Punjab National Bank, Canara Bank, Bank of Baroda, Union Bank of India, Bank of India, ICICI Bank, HDFC Bank, Citibank and HSBC). The Board consists of Balachandran.M as the chairman, Nominee from Reserve Bank of India, Nominees from ten core promoter banks and A. P. Hota, managing director and chief executive officer, NPCI. The Board for Regulation and Supervision of Payment and Settlement Systems (BPSS) at its meeting held on 24 September 2009 has approved in principle to issue authorisation to NPCI for operating various retail payment systems in the country and granted Certificate of Authorisation for operation of National Financial Switch (NFS) ATM Network with effect from 15 October 2009. NPCI has deputed its officials to IDRBT Hyderabad and NPCI has taken over NFS operations from 14 December 2009. Membership regulations and rules are being framed for enrolling all banks in the country as members so that when the nation-wide payment systems are launched, all would get included on a standardised platform.
A Technical Advisory Committee has also been constituted with two professors of IIT Bombay. N. L. Sarda is the chairman and G. Sivakumar is the Co-Chairman of the Technical Advisory Committee. Members in this committees are drawn from banks at the level of Deputy general manager/ Assistant general manager.
Services[3]
The corporation service portfolio now and in the future include:
- National Financial Switch (NFS) which connects 1,87,088 ATMs of 309 banks (89 Member Banks, 220 Sub- Member)[4]
- Immediate Payment Service (IMPS) provided to 71 member banks, with more than 7.45 crore MMID(Mobile Money Identifier) issued, and crossed 6.5 million transactions.
- National Automated Clearing House - has close to 400 banks as Live.
- Aadhaar Payments Bridge System (APBS) has more than 358 banks as Live.
- Cheque Truncation System (CTS) has fully migrated in southern, western & northern grid from MICR centres.
- Aadhaar-enabled payment system (AEPS)- has 36 member banks.
- RuPay – Domestic Card Scheme- has issued over 7.5 crore cards and enabled 10,09,211 PoS terminals in the country.[5]
References
- ↑ "National Payments Corporation of India". Npci.org.in. Retrieved 2011-03-16.
- ↑ "Mobile money transfer fee cut to 10p". Indianexpress.com. Retrieved 2011-03-16.
- ↑ http://www.npci.org.in/
- ↑ http://www.npci.org.in/
- ↑ http://www.npci.org.in/
