The RBI’s circular has led to some firms stopping pay later services, others to consider pivots and a few brazening it out in the hope of getting the regulator to blink.
In seven days, India’s buy now pay later, or BNPL, sector seems to have gone through the seven stages of grief. There’s been shock, pain, anger, bargaining, depression, hope and acceptance, in varying degrees, in every corner of the industry.
The bad news came last Monday, in the form of a circular from the Reserve Bank of India, prohibiting non-bank prepaid payment instrument operators from loading their wallets or cards with any line of credit. We wrote about this circular and its implications.
A prepaid instrument, as the name suggests, is a card or digital wallet in which customers …
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
Ashwin covered fintech and banking at The Morning Context. Previously, he was at The Economic Times, where he worked across the finance, tech and startup verticals, breaking stories related to India’s banking system, startups in the new economy, digital payments, insurance and cryptocurrencies.
Writer
ashwin@mailtmc.com
Delhi