The government plans to increase the number of point of sale (PoS) machines accepting retail payments to 5.5 million in the next six months in a bid to boost digital payments.
According to Moneycontrol, AP Hota, Managing Director and CEO, National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) said that the government has a target of 5.5 million PoS terminals by September this year. As on today, the PoS terminals stand at 2.5 million. Another 3 million need to be added — 1 milion will be traditional PoS, another 1 million QR code and the rest 1 million will be Aadhaar-enabled.
Traditional PoS machines are used to make payments with the help of debit and credit cards. QR code-enabled machines facilitate payments by scanning the QR code of a merchant account, while the Aadhaar-enabled machines use payer’s biometric fingerprint or iris scan.
All PoS terminals or machines launched after July 1 will be Aadhaar-enabled and the existing terminals will be upgraded to the same in a year’s time.
The government is targeting to increase the total digital transactions to Rs 25 billion from the current Rs 10 billion.
