Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corp. (IRCTC), a subsidiary of Indian Railways is all set to launch its very own payment gateway service targeted at gaining more revenue and reducing its dependency on third-party payment service providers, as reported by two people involved in the matter.
IRCTC, which currently is the largest consumer internet firm in terms of revenue and sells about 1.2 million tickets a month, is soon heading with its own payment gateway which is being called “i-pay” internally, as confirmed from people who spoke on the promise of anonymity.
“I-pay” is ongoing its testing phase and will be rolled out soon to add to the list of many payment gateways that currently facilitate online transactions on its platform. Once successfully launched, IRCTC in-house payment gateway would offer a strong competition to payment gateway firms such as Mobikwik, PayTM and Razorpay which are currently providing their online ticketing services on the platform.
Going in by IRCTC annual reports 2016-2017, the e-platform sold 573,300 e-tickets daily. Amounting to such bulk records, Razorpay spokesperson claimed that the company has already tied with IRCTC to facilitate the online transaction for customers through Unified Payment Interface(UPI).
Third party payment service providers like Mobikwik and Razorpay pay a one-time licensing fee to IRCTC and share the revenue in return to IRCTC for every online transaction made on its e-platform. This licensing fee can be between Rs. 75 Lakh to Rs. 1 crore. “Other than the revenue, the biggest motivation for these payments firms to be working with IRCTC is the bulk amount of transactions involved”, said a person involved with the matter.
Working with a tagline “Lifeline along the nation”, IRCTC has completed its PCI-DSS(Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) compliance last month and will extend its own payment service in full swing to other state and central departments, as confirmed from sources.