Visa to partner with BillDesk for rollout of SI-Hub solution for recurring payments
Mumbai: Visa, the global leader in payments technology and BillDesk, leader in Indian payments business today announced the rollout of SI-Hub, a seamless and secure way to make recurring payments using cards with a one-time enrollment.
Banks and merchants will be able to offer Recurring Payments/ Standing Instructions (SI) services (powered by BillDesk’s SI-Hub and Visa’s global recurring transaction framework for merchant-initiated transactions) to their cardholders to help manage payment use cases across utilities, subscription services and mutual fund SIPs among others. The RBI has recently released guidelines for e-mandate on cards for recurring transactions.
T R Ramachandran, Group Country Manager, Visa India and South Asia said “India is a market with vast potential for recurring payment needs. World Bank reports show that the lower middle-income category in India pays an average of 42 utility bills in a year, of which only 3 are paid digitally. The aspirational middle market demands a simplified payment experience without compromising on security. The recent RBI guidelines would further encourage digital payments and add to the ‘Digital India’ target of 40 billion digital transactions. Visa is glad to partner with BillDesk to offer SI-Hub to its clients and enable cardholders to decide when, how much and the duration of their recurring payments through a simple dashboard interface. The SI-Hub is a plug-n-play offering by BillDesk that Banks can rollout to their customers with minimal integration effort.”
Customers will have the ease of setting up recurring payments after the first transaction using card-based authentication. Once a consumer enrolls for recurring payments through the merchants and banks, all subsequent payments initiated by merchants will be completed seamlessly with timely notifications to the consumer using the SI-Hub.
Ajay Kaushal, Director & Co-Founder, BillDesk said, “We welcome the RBI guidelines that enable recurring payments using cards, wallets, etc. This will provide a significant fillip to small value payments while adding to security and convenience. SI-Hub provides a seamless platform for all participants to leverage the large recurring payments opportunity. SI-Hub is a standards-based platform that makes it simpler, faster, and more reliable to enable recurring payments for the payments ecosystem”
SI-Hub also empowers the consumer to take complete control of all their card-based subscriptions. Consumers will be able to manage, modify or cancel their recurring payment at any time, giving them choice to discontinue or modify services that they would have inadvertently opted into or continued through.
Merchants too will benefit from the smooth customer enrollment and surety of subsequent transactions initiated by them without requiring customer revalidation each time.
