Digital wallets to promote financial inclusion, financial resilience, and the reduction of inequalities in 2022

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Globally, digital wallets have experienced strong growth in the last two years. The Covid-19 pandemic fuelled the need for online modes of payments, and it also compelled customers and merchants to consider digital wallets as one of the primary modes of payment. Moreover, governments are also taking different initiatives to promote digital payments in their countries. Additionally, with regulatory support and shifting consumer preference, different industries and payment companies are collaborating their expertise to target a large consumer group for their digital wallets. For instance,  

• E-commerce giant eBay announced to launch its digital wallet in March 2022. The new wallet will allow users to store their sales revenue for purchasing new items or paying selling expenses. Moreover, this wallet also includes new features like allowing users to receive pay-outs on-demand or on a schedule. Together with this, the company also announced the launch of the eBay Vault, which is a storage facility and a digital platform for trading cards and other collectibles. Through these new offerings, the company is expanding its payment capabilities to improve customer satisfaction, helping sellers to grow as well as attract and retain customers.
• In March 2022, an offline on-device wallet, UPI Lite, was introduced for Indian customers by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI). This wallet will allow its users to make small-value transactions, as mentioned by the Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) recent offline UPI payments service announcement. The wallet will enable users to make UPI payments on their feature phones. However, the users will need to be online to add funds to the UPI Lite wallet. The users need to provide additional factor authentication (AFA) while adding funds. Also, the UPI AutoPay feature can also be used to automatically add funds to the wallet when it reaches a certain limit. The wallet will help the users to use the UPI apps to make payments directly from their bank accounts. The UPI apps will use the UPI Lite wallet by default for payments less than or equal to Rs 200, while the total fund limit should not cross Rs 2,000. Moreover, the users can disable the UPI wallet as per their wishes.
• Similarly, in March 2022, Telkom Financial Services introduced the Telkom Pay Mobile Point-of-Sale (mPOS) app to help small, micro, and medium business owners in South Africa to make transactions through their mobile phones. It also comes with a virtual card that is built into the app. Through the card, the businesses will be able to transfer funds from the app to their business accounts and can replenish inventory from their suppliers.

To know more and gain a deeper understanding of the global prepaid card market, click here.