The humble debit card may already be on the verge of obsolescence in India.

A couple of months ago, I had questioned the logic of the fee structure for card payments—particularly debit cards—in a piece titled “How to kill cash”. Banks across the board have little incentive to push for greater use of offline card payments, and the way to fix that, I’d argued, is to flip the free structure on its head.

A quick recap: the card payment industry works on a decades-old model.

AUTHOR

Srikanth Rajagopalan

Srikanth has been in the payments, e-commerce, and technology industries for over two decades. He has launched and scaled payments businesses both in large organisations and startups. When not questioning status quo in these industries, Srikanth spends time trying to find the correlation between jazz music and quantum physics.

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