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Transit solutions for metro projects in new smart cities, and electronic toll collection solutions will be among the focus areas for Hitachi Payment Services, Loney Antony, MD, said in a conversation with BusinessLine .
There is an increasing need for seamless payment solutions that are inter-operable across different modes of transport and across cities, he said. This will enable commuters to traverse different metro systems with a single card linked to a bank account. These kind of services will be required now as more cities launch their own metro projects for enabling easier urban commuting, he added.
Similarly, electronic toll collection services will enable increased customer convenience (by having an RFID tag attached to your car windshield that will get automatically read by a sensor at the toll and deduct the necessary toll charges from your linked bank account) as well as reduce the inconvenience as well as the risk of cash operations at toll booths.
The company has already provided such services at over 10 locations on the national highways. Currently, the daily average collection is about ₹1.6 lakh — an amount which would have earlier entailed inconvenience in collection, storage and risky movement of cash to the bank.
Hitachi Payment Services provides both cash (ATM services) and non-cash payment solutions/services for banks and merchant aggregators.
The company manages about 54,000 ATMs as well as six lakh point-of-sale (PoS) terminals. These terminals account for about 25 per cent of the market.
Loney said that the big challenge was to increase the penetration of PoS machines in the hinterland. About 2.4 million PoS machines have been installed by the industry, but with about 30 million merchants in the country, this is but a fraction.
Banks are finding it hard to expand the installation of such machines since the volumes at smaller towns and urban centres is still low and does not make it viable.
In the ATM market, there is a significant shift towards cash-recycler machines (those that accept currency apart from dispensing it), Loney said.
About 20,000 ATMs of this kind have been installed in the country so far and Loney expects this to increase steadily as old ATMs get replaced.
Banks are also seeing that there is greater efficiency in cash movement since they require less frequent replenishment and there is better utilisation with such machines, he said.
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