In order to boost the digital payments among merchants and commoners, RBI has come up with two unique solutions. At first they cut MDR charges to encourage merchants to adopt card swipe payments and second they offer cashback and lucky draw rewards for customers who pay through UPI, USSD or Aadhaar Enabled Payment System.
What is MDR?
MDR stands for Merchant Discount Rate which means if merchant discount is 3% then merchant keeps Rs.97 for every Rs.100 in sales and within MDR there’s also an interchange fees which is paid to the issuer of debit or credit cards.
Existing MDR charges: At precent, MDR charges for debit card are 1% for payments of Rs.2000 or above and 0.75% if transaction is below Rs.2000 while for credit card payments, there are no charges.
Revised MDR charges: Now RBI has decided to slash MDR charges to 0.5% for the transactions between Rs.1000-2000 and 0.25% for payments of Rs.1000 or below. These revised charges will take effect from 01 January 2017 to 31 March 2017.
All the transactions made through PoS, IMPS, USSD and UPI enabled systems will have this benefit.
Voluntarily, Axis Bank, ICICI Bank, Yes Bank and SBI had already waived off these charges on debit card transactions till 31 December, however now it’ll continue till 31 March 2017.
Lucky Grahak Yojana
Another attempt to promote cashless transactions, government of India has come up with Lucky draw offers for all the consumers who pay through USSD *99#, UPI, AEPS and RuPay cards. If you transact through these terminals, you can win Rs.1lac per week. There will be 7000 such weekly draws.
NOTE: This scheme is not valid for plastic card payments, e-wallets, netbanking and mobile banking.
Digi Dhan Vyapari Yojana
This scheme is for merchants who have adopted digital systems to accept payments. In it also there will be 7000 weekly lucky draws and maximum reward is Rs.50,000 for the merchants that uses PoS machines.
This is not the end, there will also be a Mega draw under which consumers can win Rs.1 crore, Rs.50 lacs and Rs.25 lacs as first, second and third positions respectively, whereas, merchants can will Rs.50 lacs as a maximum price money, Rs. 25 lacs and Rs.5 lacs as second and third prize respectively.
Under this Lottery scheme 15000 lucky winner can also win Rs.1000 for 100 days for the transactions made over Rs.50 to Rs.5000.
Offer Time period
This offer is valid for the transactions done between 25 December 2016 and 14 April 2017.
While announcing the new scheme, NITI Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant said, “Our objective is to make the digital payment mode a mass movement.”
