Offline Digital Payments News Today

HDFC bank launches offline digital payments pilot project in India.

Even the private sector can leverage these digital vouchers as part of their employee welfare and corporate social responsibility programmes.

One of the prerequisites for making online payments is that you have to be, well, online. All the talk of cashless payments is meaningless if you do not have an internet connection, or even if you do, it doesn't work. While India has made some great strides in digital payments (UPI, take a bow), there are still large swathes of rural and semi-urban India where cashless

The Reserve Bank of India has released a framework for offline digital payments, which it hopes will help deepen the penetration of non-cash means of transacting. The framework follows a pilot project conducted in 2020, under which transactions up to Rs 200 could be made in offline mode without additional factor authentication. The pilot, which ran between September 2020 and June 2021, involved 2.41 lakh transactions worth Rs 1.16 crore.

Under the offline mode, payments can be carried out face-to-face (proximity mode) using any channel or instrument like cards, wallets, and mobile devices.

Last year, RBI had announced a scheme to conduct pilot tests of innovative technology which enables retail digital payments even in areas where internet connectivity is low or not available at all.