With the country witnessing a digital payments revolution, the DSCI, an arm of Nasscom, is building a common platform for all the players in the digital payments ecosystem.

The Digital Payments Security Alliance forum, which will have traditional banks, payment banks, mobile wallets and the IT Ministry as members, will have its first meeting in September.

Promoted by the Union Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, the alliance will be anchored by the Data Security Council of India (DSCI). It will bring the stakeholders onto a single platform to discuss the issues and challenges faced by the digital payments ecosystem. “The first meeting of the forum is going to happen next month. There might be difference of opinion among the stakeholders but we will have a common platform to deliberate on the issues,” Rama Vedashree, Chief Executive Officer of DSCI, has said.

The forum will also act as a industry body to represent to the relevant regulators or the government on various issues pertaining to the ecosystem. “There may not be consensus. But certainly there will be informed debate,” she said.

The Nasscom arm is looking at achieving a security solutions and service market of $25 billion by 2025 in the country from the present $4.2 billion.

Rama Vedashree was here to attend a Risk Mitigation conference organised as part of the Nasscom Business Excellence Initiative.

Talking on Cyber Resilience and Privacy Challenges in a Digital World, she said there was a nearly four-fold increase in mobile wallet transactions from March 2016 to March 2017. There were over 100 crore Aadhaar-authenticated transactions last year and over 20 crore Internet of Things (IoT) devices. The number of e-payments was put at 70.7 crore with a gross value of ₹105 lakh crore.

Factoring security in designs

She said security and privacy protection was still treated as a cost centre. “There is a lack of security and privacy in design of products and systems. What we have in general is compliance-driven approach. There has been no focus on legacy systems. Vulnerabilities are out there in the open to be exploited by anyone,” she pointed out.

She cautioned security and privacy practices of small and medium businesses must be transformed as they formed part of supply chains of larger companies, with access to their computer networks. Weak-links could pose a problem to security.

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