The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) on Friday released a framework for geo-tagging payment system touchpoints and issued instructions to bank and non-bank payment system operators to maintain the geographic locations of their touchpoints and report back to them regularly to transfer .
This is in line with the announcement in the Development and Regulatory Policy Statement released with the 2021-22 Bi-Monthly Monetary Policy Statement on October 8, 2021 by the RBI.
Stressing that it is focused on deepening digital payments, RBI stated that it is committed to ensuring inclusive access for all citizens at a time when the payments ecosystem in India is growing with a variety of available payment systems, platforms, products and Services had experienced rapid developments for consumers.
“To achieve this goal, it is imperative that a robust payment acceptance infrastructure is available and accessible across the country. Geo-tagging of payment system touchpoints will enable proper monitoring of the availability of payment acceptance infrastructures such as Points of Sale (PoS) terminals and Quick Response (QR) codes.
“Such monitoring, in turn, will support policy intervention to optimize payment infrastructure distribution,” RBI said.
Mapping the precise location of existing payment system/acceptance infrastructure touchpoints (hereafter referred to as payment touchpoints) has been critical for upscaling and elaborating intervention strategies. That requirement could be effectively facilitated by geo-tagging payment touchpoints, RBI said.
Geo-tagging refers to the capturing of the geographic coordinates (latitude and longitude) of payment touchpoints used by merchants to receive payments from their customers.
It has various advantages such as B. providing insights into the regional adoption of digital payments; infrastructure density monitoring in different locations; identifying scope for delivering additional payment touchpoints; and promoting targeted digital literacy programmes. Political intervention to realize the above benefits would be facilitated by the information thus gathered, RBI added.
