Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corp. (IRCTC), the platform on which millions of railway tickets are booked on a daily basis, is now contemplating having its own payment gateway soon.
The online ticket booking site has already achieved the distinction of having the highest revenue among the consumer-oriented internet sites. IRCTC uses third-party payment gateways like Razorpay, Mobikwik and Paytm and now it will launch ‘ipay’ to manage the payments being collected on its site not just for the ticket booking facility, but also include the allied e-catering and tourism platforms. IRCTC may even extend this payment gateway facility to organizations like LIC and EPFO.
The move by IRCTC could immediately affect the operations of the above-named payment gateways currently enjoying this business. To place this in perspective over 1.2 million tickets gets sold on its site and for handling these payments being made, using credit/debit cards issued by a number of banks, they make a deposit or pay a licensing fee of Rs 75 lakh to Rs 1 crore each. They then share a certain fee with IRCTC for the transactions being routed through them. But beyond this, they gain the exposure to a very large customer base and high-volume transaction on their gateway.
‘ipay’ may take around a month or two to be fully rolled out and till then there will be a trial period during which the existing payment gateways will also function alongside. IRCTC may put in place a proper transition plan and implement it. As a first step, the PCI-DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) compliance has been completed by IRCTC already.
The payment gateway is also expected to be offered to other state and central departments post the integration with the online ticketing platform, e-catering portal and tourism platform, Mint reports.
The technology and back-up for this venture by IRCTC are being provided by MMAD Communications.