INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Mumbai: Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Friday told a representation of digital payment industry executives the government would
neither amend nor withdraw the zero merchant discount rate (MDR) policy, nor compensate these companies on losses due to the waiving off the
transactional charges in the upcoming budget.
However, the FM assured the delegation, which included Paytm CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma and
PhonePe Founder Sameer Nigam, that the banks would be mandated to continue their investment in acquiring merchants through payment service
providers (PSPs) from the capital they save up on account of handling less cash.
The six-member delegation was led by Payment Council of
India (PCI) chairman Vishwas Patel and included Ajay Kaushal, director of Billdesk; Loney Antony, vice-chairman, Hitachi Payments; and
minister appreciated the role played by payment service providers in expanding the acceptance of digital payments, she was very clear that
MDR for merchants on digital payments made through RuPay debit cards and Unified Payments Interface (UPI) devices from January 2020.
To be
sure, the MDR is the fee accrued by banks and is generally levied from the merchants processing the transactions
The current MDR charges are capped at 0.6% of cardbased transactions for payments over Rs 2,000
The costs of MDR below Rs 2,000 for banks was till last year borne by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY).
The
Revenue on 30 December brought about a zero MDR regime, effectively removing all charges paid by merchants, and sometimes the customers, on
payments made through RuPay and UPI devices.