NITI Aayog calls for strengthening payment infrastructure for NBFCs

NITI Aayog has called for strengthening the payment infrastructure to promote a level playing field for NBFCs and banks while suggesting diversification of credit sources to enable growth opportunities for MSMEs. “NBFCs can be enabled to participate more freely in the payment ecosystem through specific measures, such as issuance of credit cards and allowing for OTP based mandates, e-KYC and other services to be provided similar to banks,” it said in a report titled ‘Connected Commerce: Creating a Roadmap for a Digitally Inclusive Bharat’ and jointly released with Mastercard. Calling for a need to adopt aggregator-based models around challenges such as providing credit, lending, to help India move to an open banking/finance ecosystem, the report has suggested permitting a regulatory sandbox model on aggregator platforms in the credit and lending space tested in a pilot mode.