Coronavirus outbreak made a huge demand for contactless payments. This demand resulted in issuing new debit playing cards by the major players in the banking sector. Indian banks issued more than 1.6 crore new debits cards in the peak months of coronavirus. The major change we can see in the issuance of cards was, it replaced the magnetic stripe playing cards with the brand new contactless variant.
Jan Dhan financial institution accounts beneficiaries also require purposeful playing cards for entry to the accounts. This also pushed the issuance of new debit cards. Operations at bank branches have been staggered because of the nationwide lockdown.so the circulation of debit cards issued by state-owned banks jumped to 597.1 million from 585.6 million where the overall circulation reached 845 million. The central financial institution information confirmed that the non-public sector banks issued about 4 million playing cards within the interval and the circulation reached 168.6 million.
Navin Surya, the Chairman Emeritus of the Cost Council of India said that the three major causes for the increase in circulation of debit cards are pent-up demand since March and April which was mirrored when courier companies reopened in Could, demand for the contactless payment because of the Covid-19 and the substitute of redundant playing cards by public-sector banks. In the same period, banks had additionally deployed 2.15 million QR-based stickers in partnership with third-party cost firms and around 295,000 micro ATMs have been purposeful. The debit transactions reached 80 percent in June where it had shown a plunge in April because of the Nationwide lockdown.
All the Indian banks were in a process of replacing the magnetic stripe playing cards to chip and PIN playing cards. The drive, which stretched over 12 months, had resulted within the variety of debit playing cards in circulation contracting to 816.7 million in January 2020 from a peak of 998 million in October of 2018. The last two years’ data of RBI shows that the Online addition of 16 million new cards between April and June of 2020 is the second-highest over ¼ since Indian banks initiated the substitute train in 2018.
