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It's Time India Gets Cashless Payment

India just had a mobile network revolution yesterday; thanks to Reliance Jio. It's time India gets another long-due technology i.e. mobile payment. There are many advantages of using mobile payment over cash or ATM cards.

  1. You are less likely to lose your phone - assuming you fiddle with your phone as much as I do. Even if you lose your phone, you can at least try to track it down using GPS.
  2. Your phone doesn't physically deteriorate over time.
  3. No need for mints. No wastage of paper. It's environment friendly.
  4. No maintenance needed unlike ATMs.
  5. More secure than ATM PIN codes. Mobile payment uses your fingerprints for verification.
  6. Mobile payment is much more convenient. Your employer transfers your salary to the bank and you can directly pay from your bank account. No need to withdraw the cash and hand it over to the merchant, who eventually does the reverse process after they received the money. Such waste of time. Instead just bring your phone or watch close to the payment terminal and your done. How easy is that!
  7. And dude, it's more hygienic! Let's not touch dirty notes, shall we?
  8. Best of all, we won't have to deal with the fake notes anymore.

There are many Indian companies which have been implementing merchant payment in their apps. PayTm and FreeCharge are two of the popular ones. But they are not as convenient as Android Pay, Apple Pay or Samsung Pay. Because you have to either scan a code or enter a phone number to transfer the money and before that you have to transfer the money to the app's "wallet" from your bank account.

Of course there will be challenges implementing mobile payment in India. One of biggest hurdle is 2 factor authentication for Indian debit/credit cards. I am assuming this is the reason why none of the mobile payment solutions support Indian banks, yet. Because of 2 factor authentication, you also cannot use your cards in Google Play Store or Apple iTunes or even Netflix. Content creators worry about piracy. Even if someone wants to buy digital content legally, there's no way to do that. I'm hoping this situation will start to change in the next 2 years. It must. Just as Mukesh Ambani said yesterday, India cannot be left behind.

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