Plastic nationalism: Can India really shelve Visa and Mastercard for RuPay

 Ater card platforms suspended Russian clients’ access to merchants overseas, the link between plastic and politics has acquired a more serious dimension.

Long before the war in Ukraine, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi decided that international card networks could be used as instruments of statecraft — and that he should channel the rising economic power of his country’s 1.4 billion people to resist the dominance of Visa Inc., Mastercard Inc. and American Express Co. “Everyone cannot go to the border for the security of the nation,” Modi said in a 2018 speech. “If you develop a habit of using RuPay card … that will also become a medium to serve the nation.”

Like Russia’s Mir and China UnionPay Co., RuPay is a homegrown card network, promoted by the National Payments Corporation of India since 2012. New Delhi has pushed it so aggressively over the last few years that a worried Visa Inc. has complained to the U.S. government about the lack of an even playing field in India, according to Reuters. Mastercard has grumbled as well. Meanwhile, Discover Financial Services’ Diners Club as well as Mastercard and American Express have gotten into regulatory trouble with the Reserve Bank of India over data localization rules….

Cash may be king in India, but Google is prince of mobile payments

The company has one of its fastest-growing hits ever with Google Pay, a two-year-old app that millions of consumers are using to spend and transfer tens of billions of dollars

The leading player in the battle for mobile payments in India isn’t either of China’s pioneers, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. orTencent Holdings Ltd. It isn’t Apple Inc, Visa Inc or even PayPal Holdings Inc.

It’s Google.

The Alphabet Inc unit has for years tried to diversify its revenues beyond advertising by pushing into new fields like cloud computing and hardware. While its profits remain healthy, it needs new ways to make money as the specter of regulation looms at home and around the globe. Its booming new business in the world’s largest untapped digital market could be the engine of expansion that it has been looking for.

In India today, the company has one of its fastest-growing hits ever with Google Pay, a two-year-old app that millions of consumers are using to spend and transfer tens of billions of dollars. Resembling a chat app and available in local languages, Google Pay was the most downloaded financial technology app world-wide last year, according to SensorTower, a research and marketing firm for the app industry.

Indian consumers use it to buy train tickets, pay bills and even to purchase lunchtime meals from street vendors. Tiny mom-and-pop shops around the country now display a logo with a large “G” and Google’s blue, red, yellow and green colors, signaling that merchants accept payments via the app, which is free for all to use.