Innovation Partnerships:

Partners combined forces to flesh out two or three interesting partnership ideas, including linking wage digitization with payment use cases, combining a cash management network and digital credit facility to digitize a brand supply chain, and QR code technologies to enable mass transit payments and other retail categories (e.g., Pharmacies).

Approach Validation:

A panel discussion on the “relevance of an ecosystem approach” elicited broad support for Catalyst’s ecosystem approach as a means to solve coordination based market failures and exploit network effects across consumers, merchants and suppliers to accelerate digital payments adoption and use. Interoperability (of both payments and data) as a priority theme was endorsed, as was the need for demand creation mechanisms such as financial literacy campaigns and some assisted onboarding, especially since the cost of cash is not internalized by small merchants. The other key areas discussed were the need to liberalize merchant acquiring, business models that drive merchant trials, controlled experiments for evidence based policy design (e.g., single factor authentication for low ticket transactions, eKYC norms), and the critical role of monetary (especially tax breaks) and non-monetary incentives to change behavior.