Visa Pauses Its Single-Click Checkout Service in India

With the Reserve Bank of India increasing security around digital payments, credit card payment company Visa has put a pause on its single-click checkout service in India.

Introduced back in 2019, the feature allowed customers to purchase goods of up to ₹2000 via online transactions without the hassle of entering either an OTP (one-time password) or CVV (card verification value).

It also offered a more comfortable user experience than even Unified Payments Interface (UPI) that's been so wildly popular for small-value transactions. There's also been an estimate that the single-click feature could increase the success rate of transactions which is currently less than 80 percent.

At the time of the launch of this feature, T.R. Ramachandran, former group country manager, of Visa India, and South Asia, said, "Thanks to the rapid growth of e-commerce, Indian e-commerce merchants are grappling with an ever-growing number of consumer issues such as cart abandonment, connectivity, and incorrect passwords during the payment leg of their transaction. Built exclusively for these unique challenges in the Indian e-commerce market, Visa Safe Click helps eliminate these points of friction."

Several payment aggregators such as Paytm and Razorpay, and food-delivery platforms such as Swiggy, were quick to integrate this feature into their applications. Banks such as ICICI Bank, and Axis Bank too supported the single-click feature.

However, presently Visa's move to pause the feature comes on the heels of RBI's security mandate to tighten security for digital payments. The company is also said to be working on an authentication feature mandated by the RBI.

This is not the first time that the RBI has introduced such a mandate. In 2019, the RBI mandated tokenization (replacing card details with tokens) on e-commerce platforms to keep card details safe against any online phishing attacks and misuse.

It also mandated all online payment services providers such as Paytm and Razorpay to obtain a payment aggregator license. The license comes with strict audit approvals and requires online payment providers to follow a specific set of principles.

While a few companies such as Razorpay and Cashfree have gotten their licenses, others like PayU and Paytm have their licenses in process.

Source: Inc42