The lockdown currently in force across the country has made people to change their transaction behaviour. Disruptions such as demonetisation have been responsible for payment platforms, such as PayPal and Paytm etc, to witness a geometric rise in the number of digital transactions in India.
U.S.-headquartered digital payments-enabling platform, PayPal has on Wednesday revealed some interesting numbers in digital payments and trends it is observing that have emerged post the lockdown imposed after the pandemic.
According to Sri Shivananda, SVP and CTO, PayPal, there has been an unprecedented demand for online transactions over the past one month as usage of cash has reduced and share of digital money gone up drastically due to apprehension that currency notes or coins could be carriers of the virus.
Interestingly, 32% of customers have increased the use of digital payments and 47% have concerns over fraud, according to a generic study. The payment platform that currently has over 300 million active customers saw the highest ever number of transactions on May 1. It hopes to add another 15-20 million new customers in Q2 of 2020.
PayPal currently processes ₹16 lakh per second, or ₹10 crore per minute, or ₹600 crore an hour, ₹15,000 crore a day, or to put it simply ₹50 lakh crore a year.
Shivananda said this was a trust business and security at every level, right from customer’s device to all the way up to to PayPal’s servers, was extremely critical.
PayPal, which has a major focus on risk and security of transactions, has a cyberdefence centre which is on high alert 24/7, looking for attack vectors. “Customers are protected by the depth and layered security, which means protections that apply on your devices within the app, network applications, right kind of infrastructure etc. Under a cryptographic environment, customer information becomes more safe and secured,” he added.
“PayPal is catching up among older people too,” said Guru Bhat, VP Customer Success Platform, GM PayPal India, “as this demography is also increasingly getting onto the digital payment platforms.’’
PayPal currently collaborates with developer community across the world to identify bugs. On security front, it keeps a watch on the dark web, listen to the conversations and apply some of its learnings to its own intelligence. Most of its cybersecurity initiatives, backed by data science, Machine Learning, and Artiticial Intelligence, are spearheaded from its development centres in Bengaluru, Chennai and Hyderabad, as per Mr. Bhat.
