Watch: Arvind Ronta on how the pandemic has put contactless payments in overdrive at Visa

For Visa, the San Francisco based payments major , the pandemic as well as Reserve Bank of India’s proposal to pilot contactless payments has opened new channels for growth in India. 

Contactless cards as well as tap-pay-features have been around for a while, especially in the Asia Pacific region. However, India is yet to see a rise in cashless payments and the new normal could act as a perfect catalyst for these payment systems to grow. 

In an interview with TechCircle, Arvind Ronta, head of products, India and South Asia at Visa said that the payments firm will look at bringing its contactless offline payment technology to India for small ticket transactions. 

“We have done a good job of issuance and there are close to 3 million terminals on the acceptance side,” Ronta said, adding that India will pick speed on contactless payments as more options are presented to consumers.

Visa, which has previously backed payment aggregator and unicorn BillDesk as well as business-to-business payments company PayMate, continues to partner with companies that add to its strategic interests. 

“We are unlike a typical venture capital firm in the sense that the partnership has to make commercial sense. We start with commercial partnerships,” Ronta said, adding that data, loyalty and rewards were other sectors in which Visa had partnered Indian companies. 

Through its Visa Everywhere Initiative launched in India in 2019, the company also works closely with fintech companies in the sector of issuance, acceptance infrastructure at small merchants, digitising business to business payments and other problem statements.