‘Cards may land banks with a 3,800 cr. hole’

The Centre’s digital payments push, mainly card payments through PoS machines, may leave already capital starved banks bleeding by ₹3,800 crore annually, warns a report.

After November’s note-ban, the government has pushed banks into deploying millions of point-of-sale (PoS) machines to encourage online payments.

This has resulted in increase in debit plus credit cards transactions at PoS from ₹51,900 crore in October 2016 to ₹68,500 crore in July 2017.

“We estimate that for OFF-US transactions, the aggregate annual loss for card transactions at PoS terminals is around ₹4,700 crore. However, the net revenue gain per annum from ON-US transactions at PoS would be around ₹900 crore only.“Therefore, the total annual loss to the industry is around ₹3,800 crore,” SBI Research.