“Penetration of electronic payments is still very low in India but there is an immense opportunity. The roll out of the identity project (Aadhaar) will provide a great platform for commerce and all sort of things can be built on that platform,” said Ann Cairns, president, international markets, MasterCard.
MasterCard, said to be the world’s second-largest payment and technology firm, opened its analysis centre in Delhi last year. It’s looking to process an ever-growing amount of global data, now at 10 petabytes (a million gigabytes), and sell information as a stand-alone product, or provide consulting based on that.
“Because our data is online and real time, we can tell what people are really buying, what consumers are doing in the
“In some cases, cross-border transactions have fallen because Europeans are travelling within the continent and not outside,” explained Cairns.
Within India,
The payment company is hopeful that India will follow trends that have been observed in some of Far Eastern countries. “There, transactions are shifting more online, (there’s a) massive increase in cross-border commerce. In places like South Korea, we have seen people buying things directly from America through online (sites),” said Cairns.
According to an