After a brief high in the wake of demonetization, the card networks have faced intense competition in India. To stay relevant, they’ve adopted a collaborative approach. Will it work?
With digital payments on a high, e-commerce volumes gaining ground and digital banking all the rage in India, you’d imagine card-issuing companies like Visa and Mastercard to be singing in the rain. Except, they aren’t.
Both companies used demonetization (the government ’s November 2016 move to invalidate all Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 currency notes) to push their cards business, but that came to an abrupt halt once the pandemic struck in 2020. The “strong medicine” of demonetization itself is now bearing fruit for young entrepreneurs and startups, but for older firms like Visa and Mastercard, the experience has soured …
Advait is a financial journalist and a former writer at The Morning Context. Here, he wrote on India’s banks, the wider financial services industry and the fintech ecosystem. He has previously worked with the Economic and Political Weekly, Business Standard, BloombergQuint and MediaNama, where he covered everything from the Reserve Bank of India to fintech policy.
Writer
advait@mailtmc.com
Mumbai