I Do What I Do

by Raghuram G. Rajan

The broader issue is whether through sophisticated state-of-the-art technology, we can offer customers products that are simple, low cost, and easy to use. We have done this with mobile phones, can we do it with banking? Payments may be another obvious product. I should note that our payments infrastructure in India is very advanced. We have three large RBI technology centres devoted to supporting payments and robust payment and settlement networks for both large value and small transactions. We have introduced an additional factor of authentication for all e-commerce transactions – which makes these transactions more secure – and are swiftly moving to Chip and PIN technology for credit card transactions. SMS alerts for bank and credit card transactions are an important advance relative to even the United States, where thieves find it easy to bill thousands of dollars to your credit card even before you know it is stolen. All this means that we have the infrastructure to provide cheap and safe payments and remittances. What we need are non-governmental players to utilize this infrastructure to provide the products and access that people want.