Headquartered in Mumbai, Maharashtra, ENAM is a provider of mobilizing resources for IPOs and provides M&A and corporate advisory services to companies and institutions.


India, where Cash is King, Payment industry has been evolving very fast and changing from traditional cash based approach to a new online model in the recent years. With the advent of banking system, payment business has undergone a dramatic change. The technology has led to the evolution of mobile payments, mobile wallets and a social payment solution, empowering users to make virtual payment anywhere like movie tickets, Recharge Mobile/DTH, Railway tickets and much more. It’s just send and receive payments as easy as sending a text message. It’s not just the big guys adopting this new technology; we can see small stall owners, cab drivers accepting Mobile payments via their phones.

Mobile payment is growing rapidly in India especially in the mCommerce industry due to convenience in transactions and seamless shopping experience. Today users have wide range of options available for online payment like mobile wallets, mobile banking applications provided by banks. Online payments systems are in place since long and that has played a good role in promoting the mobile payment systems in India. There are many mobile payment methods and some of them are new like P2P( person-to-person) is the new online payment system which India will adopt it soon. User can transfer funds to anyone in their mobile phone contacts, using their bank accounts or credit cards to another individual’s account via a mobile phone. Facebook has recently announced a new feature ‘peer-to-peer’ free payments into its application ‘Facebook messenger’ that will enable users to transfer funds to others on an instant basis while chatting. Facebook will certainly make an effort to tap the huge potential of India, its largest user market in the near future. This move has surely opened up opportunities for start-ups in the mobile payments space to target newer opportunities in the financial segment. The recent announcements by one of the leading India’s private bank and Facebook in this space are enough to bring more scale to this growing market. This solution brings a lot of convenience and usability to a large segment of users including students, workers and small businesses (dealing with a lot of smaller cash transactions) to send and receive money using a mobile phone in a secured way.

We are progressively moving towards a “mobile first” world. Mobile is now becoming a mainstream medium for different types of monetary transactions and will soon become the only ‘one-stop solution’.

mCommerce market in India is in nascent stage, m-payment and m-banking segments have shown significant growth over the last couple of years. As smartphone sales journey increased by 51% every three months, and the expectations is mobile commerce market may grow by 55% from its current growth. It is necessary to get people used to mobile payment system by keeping very low transaction charges and offering customers benefits and discounts.

Mobile payment service operated under financial regulation but still there are challenges in mobile payment in India like lack of necessary infrastructure for mobile payment acceptance, poor levels of literacy are a problem, and voice-based payment services offer a potential solution especially in local languages and they can work on all handsets and can be used by all irrespective of one’s comfort level with technology or level of literacy. The mobile payment services have to be effective in terms of usability, cost, efficiency, interoperability security for transactions of all ticket sizes. Mobile security is the thorn in the flesh, 57% of consumers cite security as the main reason for not using mobile payments. Mobile payment options should be available even on low end mobile handsets. Retailers will have to upgrade their IT systems to take full advantage of mobile payment systems.“Transactional failure” is one of the important issues in payment transfer. Smooth payment transfer is the responsibility of companies providing mobile payment services. It needs to be addressed quickly as it might take a toll on the traffic of consumer and merchants.

The future of mobile payments in India depends largely on the payments bank license which is to be provided by RBI. The young Indians are the key mobile payment drivers and large proportion of the population being very young who are often enthusiastic to take up new technologies and services. There’s a lot of room for transformation and innovation in mobile payments and mobile payments will likely play a large role in the Banking industry’s future. Indeed, all these factors are seeding and feeding an active start-up scene in mobile payments in India, and the future looks more promising than ever.