Mobile wallet users news: Those who have been using prepaid payment instruments or mobile wallets are likely to face a problem by March 2019, as the companies providing these services will not be unable to meet the directive issued by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to complete know-your-customer (KYC) verification, said an Economic Times report. The report quoted a senior executive with a New Delhi-based payments company as saying “More than 95 per cent of the mobile wallets in the country could stop being operational by March.” The senior executive further told ET that there is no eKYC and the RBI has not given any clear-cut guidelines about the alternative KYC procedures that they plan to approve, adding. “The deadline is just a few weeks away and we cannot adhere to (it) with this rate of progress.” 

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Earlier in October 2017, the central bank had issued guidelines asking prepaid payment instruments (PPIs) to gather all information required under the KYC norms. Citing industry executives, the report said that companies so far have been able to merely validate just a part of their total user base, and are yet to complete biometric or physical authentication of the majority of customers. Highlighting that there have been talks about alternative KYC methods like using video-based authentication or XML-based KYC, but none of these procedures has been formally okayed by the RBI, said the news daily.
 
The report further quoted another payment executive as saying, “We are waiting till January 8, that is the last day of the winter session of Parliament; let us see what happens to the Aadhaar Bill. We will reach out to RBI and ask for the next course of action.” According to the report, several digital wallet firms which were used for remittance have moved to the business correspondent channels due to regulatory restrictions while quoted another senior executive as saying “Only standalone wallets will be directly affected by the (current impasse).” 

Notably, private entities have failed to carry out Aadhaar-based e-KYC after the Supreme Court’s verdict to restrict private firms from accessing the Aadhaar details of consumers.