By Kushal Bhatt
?I recently saw an Idea 4G advertisement wherein an urban girl encourages the village natives to adopt the fastest technology and provides them with training to build their own business models in the village itself, the move especially targeting the village women. Indirectly, it delivers a message across the entrepreneurs to set up their business projects in rural areas also because of the due advantage of vast workforce prevailing in villages. A question knocked on my door and asked, “How many developing countries have been successful by adopting a cashless economy?” So the first country that pops undoubtedly is Kenya, where 95 percent of the businesses are conducted without cash and 96 percent of the Kenyan households go digital for fulfilling their daily needs. Kenyan entrepreneurs have also helped in waving — “mobile money economy”, that has helped Kenya to earn the nickname of “Silicon Savannah”, according to the Reuters website.
Notable countries like India, Venezuela and Zimbabwe have recently adopted mobile-money-economy and are significantly doing well by not storing cash in its physical form rather in digital form. It also gives a tough competition to government issued paper-currency. In India, digital platforms like Paytm, Freecharge have been thriving; likewise, in Kenya, M-Pesa revolutionized mobile money. Since Kenya is a less populated country than India, it is easier to govern a minimal population. The country also has other numerous players in the market for mobile money revolution. I am not going to compare Kenya with India here, but after demonetization of the old 500 and 1000 rupees notes, maximum number of digital transactions are made by the Paytm application, it has since taken over the reputation of serving as a ‘mini-bank’ to the Indians.
Definitely there is a huge advantage of becoming a cashless economy for India because it minimizes the opportunity prospect of hoarding huge amounts of cash. Being such a situation, I favor and side a cashless economy in India, but the benefits of digital financial revolution are not equally reaching within the developing countries. Zimbabwe encourages rural entrepreneurs by removing hefty regulations and encouraging competition in which India completely lags behind due to some politicians who make tough regulatory policies. Energetic entrepreneurs will have to craft their way out of these regulatory policies.
Developed countries utilize different tools like social commerce and payments, cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin are unarguably the next step in the evolution of e-money and they are designed for today’s businesses. Furthermore, cryptocurrencies offer exciting opportunities for new businesses to take advantage of future online markets. Leading companies including Apple, Windows, Amazon have already started accepting Bitcoins.
The day I was writing this article, the same day our government launched a new mobile application called BHIM (Bharat Interface for Money) from National Payments corporation of India. It is currently available only on Android. I instantly downloaded and examined the application, it supports Aadhar-based payments wherein transactions would be possible with just a fingerprint impression. So after going through this application, I asked my myself what was so special about this application, here I got my answer–
“BHIM has options to transfer via IFSC and MMID as well for non-UPI banks which gives it a cutting-edge from other Chinese funded digital payment applications (don’t want to name them) and it shows that the government has decided to go with one application that will enable digital payments via UPI.”
So, everyone must start accepting and activating UPI as a payment method and the Aadhar-based payments part for BHIM is yet to be rolled out and I am keenly waiting for it and you must all download the application straight away.
P.C. Africa Telecom
