Comment by nunez | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nunez | Hacker News Reader

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I completely believe it. I spent two months in Hyderabad. India is WAYYY ahead on the payments game.

Every business, no matter the size, accepted mobile payments (usually PayTM, but I saw support for PhonePe, Zeta and others). The US is super behind on this; very, very, very few retailers accept Square Cash, more accept PayPal, none of them accept those payments easily. Any app that does mobile banking requires KYC verification. For mobile payments, usually support soft KYC, which you can easily fake, but only lasts 180 days. For anything else online banking related, hard (in-person) KYC was required.

Every terminal supported credit/debit cards (though using international cards was a crap-shoot, and AMEX even more so) and all of them expected Chip + PIN. People were legitimately surprised when they saw that I had to sign. Some didn't even ask for the signature because they weren't used to it.

Everything in India uses SMS OTP and requires an India phone number to receive it. This was super annoying before getting a Indian SIM card, but once I did, I realized how nice of a system this was.

There were many things about the India experience that I wasn't a fan of; paying for stuff was definitely not one of htem.

>>India is WAYYY ahead on the payments game.

Only if you(and the person receiving) can afford a smart phone, and an internet connection.

The edge US has is the cards are ubiquitous, they cost nothing to carry and use. Every one has them, and every one receiving them has the readers. Most credit unions don't charge for checking accounts, and transaction fees are $0.

US is WAYYY ahead on the payments access game.

Not just that but getting an account to process international card is very difficult in India and setting up recurring payments or SaaS very difficult.

I recently tried to buy Office 365 from MS India. It just kept on failing with my India debit card even though it accepts both debit/credit cards. The error message was not helpful and finally came to know from customer care that it was due to the debit card. So, it can go both ways.

Recurring payments have been intentionally blocked by the banking regulator in India by requiring 2FA for every online transaction to prevent abuse/fraud. It is a known pain intentionally traded off - hopefully will get fixed at some point.

I think the issue with international cards is also likely linked to online transaction 2FA policy. Some American banks don't implement 2FA and that's likely the reason they fail. I've never had a problem with my Singapore card.

> Only if you(and the person receiving) can afford a smart phone, and an internet connection

The number of people in India who can likely exceeds adult population of the United States :-)

US is always No. 1

These days owning smartphone isn't a big Deal. You can see lots of rikshaw puller, day labour, tea vendors, shop workers using smartphone. Jio data plans also played the important role in it.

Actually the way I see it, tech illiteracy is a big hurdle. A lot of people don't use smartphone because learning to operate it is too much for them.

No, owning a smart phone is still a big deal. Cheap data plans are because the richest man in India subsidized them by taking a loan he will never repay, and likely get a tax payer bailout.

Any usable smart phone is still expensive. Most people on the streets don't have chargers, or stations. If it rains they can't keep buying a new one every day.

Even more than that electronic money is still a far cry. You first need to have money.

> For anything else online banking related, hard (in-person) KYC was required.

I'm not sure what your source is on this, but I've opened the vast majority of my financial accounts without any in-person KYC, including checking, savings, debit card, credit card, and every online payment account I've ever had.

There are a bunch of banks in the US (including my primary bank) which don't have branches to even do an in-person KYC at.

There are a lot of barriers to a great p2p and p2b payment system here, but in-person KYC isn't one of them.

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