Mumbai: The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has sought innovations in the area of feature phone payments, offline digital transactions and contactless payments.

The RBI on Monday invited applications for testing new products and services for retail payments system under the regulatory sandbox scheme.

The RBI’s regulatory sandbox is the finance industry’s equivalent of clinical trials where new products are allowed to be introduced but they are ring-fenced by restricting the availability to a limited number, like in a pilot project.

The RBI follows a cohort approach where those eligible have to apply to the regulator with their ideas who then selects the ones that it is comfortable with. In August this year, the RBI had permitted startups, banks and financial institutions to set up regulatory sandbox (RS) for live testing of innovative products in areas like retail payments, digital KYC and wealth management.

The RBI said the window for submission of applications will be be open from November 15 to December 15, 2019. “The adoption of ‘retail payments’ as the theme is expected to spur innovation in digital payments space and help in offering payment services to the unserved and under-served segment of the population. Migration to digital modes of making a payment can obviate some of the costs associated with a cash economy and can give customers a friction-free experience,” it said

Published On : 05-11-2019

Source : Times of India