Mobile money accounts comprise 55 per cent of such e-money accounts. Easy access to POS ready merchants and vendors is key for building the credibility of plastic money as an alternative to cash.. There are, in addition, 30 million micro enterprises. Over the period of 2010 to 2015, the number of e-money accounts have grown at the rate of an astonishing 63 per cent per annum — more than triple the rate at which bank accounts have increased over the same period in economies which lack universal financial access.A 2015 World Bank survey established that increasing the number of banked people in the economy is the most relevant intervention till one reaches the level of around 800 accounts per 1,000 adults. But, in India, e-money continues to languish at merely 10 per cent of transactions.

The future is digital.Plastic money becomes expensive to use if the individual transactions are small.5 million commercial entities accept cashless transactions in India. For the government, the biggest gain is an easy audit trail to assess individuals and businesses to tax and to ferret out illegal transactions like the financing of crime, terror, smuggling and drugs. Typically, micro-transactions of less than $5 (Rs 340) are not viable through plastic money and would need to be cross-subsidised.India has 26 million credit cards and 712 million debit cards. This is virtually impossible via our clunky and inefficient public sector banking system. Bringing all these service providers into the POS net expands the market by an order of magnitude.A more serious missing servo Injection Molding Machine Manufacturers link for ramping up cashless transactions is the relative scarcity of point of sale (POS) acceptability of cashless transactions.

The corresponding numbers are less than one for a credit card at an ATM and 38 at a POS. Engage millennials to figure out how to fast forward us there out of turn. The incentive structure, which today privileges cash settlement because of its lower transaction cost, must be reviewed and reversed. Compare this with around 40 per cent of cash transactions in more developed markets. In comparison cards or e-money options are used to conduct around 280 transactions a year per person in high-income economies. After all, cigarettes are still sold as singles in India; a paan (betel) costs just Rs 20 and a street meal is Rs 100. But how far are we from the point where a cashless economy can kick in?