(30 November 2021 – India) Visa raised concerns with the US Trade Representative (USTR) about India favouring the domestic payments card provider RuPay, three years after Mastercard did so privately in 2018.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has suggested that it’s patriotic to use RuPay, the country’s central bank has directed Mastercard and Visa to store payments data only in India, and the Indian government has promoted RuPay cards for use for payments for public transportation and has pressured banks to issue the cards, according to the report.
“Visa remains concerned about India’s formal and informal policies that appear to favour the business of the National Payments Corporation of India over other domestic and foreign electronic payments companies,” said a USTR memo.
RuPay accounted for 63 percent of India's 952 million debit and credit cards as of November 2020, according to the most recent regulatory data on the company, up from just 15 percent in 2017.