Global ride-hailing company Uber is scrambling to find payments partners in India to meet new mobile-payments regulations that go live on Oct. 31, India’s Economic Times reported.
The most likely partners are Paytm, which launched in February and has 12 million mobile wallet users, and payment gateway PayU, whose customers include Snapdeal, Jabong, Bookmyshow, BigBasket and Groupon India, according to unnamed sources with direct knowledge of the search. Neither company would comment on any discussions.
In most countries, Uber stores credit card details of passengers and automatically charges the card once the taxi ride is over, using an international payment gateway. But under new regulations that India’s central bank issued in August, online payments in India must use two-factor authentication (which Uber’s payment gateway doesn’t support) and must be carried out in Indian rupees and not dollars.
Two-factor authentication will require users to receive a one-time PIN by mobile phone in order to complete the transaction, which will be a problem with poor Internet connectivity in India. “The one-click smooth seamless payment offering of Uber will vanish,” said Alok Mehta, director at payment processing firm Atom Technologies. “A passenger is not going to wait for more than two minutes to authenticate payment.”
To get around the new requirements, one Uber rival, taxi aggregator TaxiFor-Sure, has introduced physical mobile-wallet point-of-sale machines in the taxis on its network.
