UAE Exchange, a leading player in the business of foreign exchange buying and selling, money transfers and ticketing, has seen business being impacted post demonetisation. Remittance business volumes dropped 50 per cent while forex business was down 30 per cent, V George Antony, Managing Director, said.

Still, he is optimistic that normalcy will be restored in the next two quarters and expects the economy to rebound from the second quarter of FY18. He expects the clean-up of the system, the crackdown on black money and the focus on going digital will yield tremendous benefits to the economy in the medium- and long term.

He said there is a change that is already visible even in day-to-day operations. For instance, his company is now focusing on transforming into a completely digital enterprise by March 2017. Giving an example of the operations that would be digitised, Antony said that the company (which has 400 branches) would be issuing a minimum of 5,000 cheques every day and there were separate departments and staff allocated for cheque issue, collection and reconciliation. This will now be moved to a completely digital process and the resultant gains would be significant, he said. If the same thing happens across multiple companies and locations, one can see how the economy stands to gain, he said.

Antony said that customers were willing to use electronic wallets and the focus of the company would be on converting its one crore customers to use its digital wallet Xpay. Although there may be some pain in the short term, Antony said that hawala and black money operators will now be driven out of the system and only genuine companies will be able to survive.

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