Coming soon: Transfers between e-wallets

BENGALURU: You will soon be able to transfer money from your Paytm e-wallet to a friend’s MobiKwik e-wallet. The RBI on Tuesday issued final guidelines for interoperability for prepaid payment instruments (PPIs) or mobile wallets. E-wallet companies can also now partner with leading card networks like

Mastercard

or Visa to issue their own cards that can be used to make payments. Prior to this, digital wallets were what is called closed-loop, allowing flow of money only within its network. With interoperability, consumers can seamlessly make transactions across different

e-wallets

.


The RBI said that for interoperability, mobile wallets will be able to issue payment addresses using the

Unified Payments Interface

(UPI) network. Industry players say the RBI directive will bring a level-playing field among e-wallet players and boost digital payments. The banking regulator said new cards should be based on

EMV

chips and be PIN-compliant.

The move

comes at a time when UPI was stealing the thunder from e-wallets. Via UPI, users are able to send money and make payments directly from their bank accounts instead of loading the money in an e-wallet before a transaction. UPI transactions grew to around 405 million in September, while transactions via mobile wallets dropped to 320 million in July, the latest month for which such data is available. The government too has been aggressively pushing UPI payments.