Moody’s Confidence on the Indian Bank rises

By Shivam Saklani

Global credit rating agency “Moody’s Investor Service” recently changed its reviews about 3 Indian banks namely, “Bank of India”, “Union Bank”, “Oriental Bank of Commerce”.

Moody’s changed its rating from “negative” to “stable” for these banks. Moody has also affirmed the standalone credit profiles or baselines credit assessments at “ba3”.

The government’s 2.1 lakh crore recapitalization (about which an article has also been published, a couple of weeks ago is being seen as a major role player for this change.

The revision in ratings reflect Moody’s view that the government’s capital infusion plan alleviates some of the downside risks to their BCA or Baseline Credit Assessment, which is a part of bank rating methodology and ratings.

Meanwhile, the ratings agency has affirmed the Baa3/P-3 local and foreign currency bank deposit rating of the 3 Indian PSB. Furthermore Moody believes that the   additional capital will help banks take accelerated provisioning for their problem assets, which will in turn improve their capacity to haircut on those assets, in a resolution process. It also expects that some banks, now will be able to raise capital from equity markets which will support capitalization profiles.

UPI crosses 70 million transactions in October

By Aashi Sehrawat

Unified Payments Interface (UPI) is an instant real-time payment system developed by National Payments Corporation of India facilitating inter-bank transactions. The interface is regulated by the Reserve Bank of India and works by instantly transferring funds between two bank accounts on a mobile platform.

UPI has shown a more than 100% growth for the month of October against September of this year. As per the data shared by NPCI on its website, it showed 76.9 million transactions against 30.9 million as compare to last month. If considered in terms of amount transferred through UPI, it has experienced a gain of 32.5%, that is from Rs. 5325 crore (last year) to Rs. 7057 crore. 

UPI has emerged as the major game changer in the digital payments space after demonetisation has shown rapid growth with the entry of brands like Google, Truecaller into the UPI based payments space. 

Various updates relating to the UPI are as follows: 

San Francisco basedtaxi hailing firm, Uber integrated with payment option Unified Payments Interface (UPI) in August’17

Airtel now has UPI as its payment system available for its customers.   Airtel Payments Bank UPI can facilitate instant fund transfers between two bank accounts on the mobile platform without asking for the beneficiary’s account details. 

Even the government launched its own application BHIM (Bharat Interface for Money) to work on the UPI platform. Also in partnership with NPCI, around 57 banks have gone live on UPI developing their own UPI apps. 

Since the beginning of the financial year, UPI transaction volume rose 380% to 77 million in October from 3.8 million in April this year, mainly driven by BHIM and Flipkart’s payment arm PhonePe. Also with the addition of Google’s Tez payment application there has been a significant jump in P2P payments on the UPI platform.