Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corp. (IRCTC) which generates more revenue than Flipkart, Amazon and other consumer internet firms, will soon launch its own payment gateway to reduce dependency on third-party payment service providers like Paytm, Mobikwik, Razorpay that currently power IRCTC’s railway ticket booking transactions.
According to IRCTC’s 2016-2017 annual report, the ticketing platform on an average sells 573,000 e-tickets daily. As per information provided by various sources to media organizations, the new gateway tentatively called “ipay” is going to be launched later this year and will be equipped to carry out over 1.2 million transactions a month.
At present, payment platforms such as Mobikwik, PayU and Paytm, power IRCTC’s railway ticket booking transactions through their gateways. Last month, Razorpay had tied with IRCTC to help customers transact online through Unified Payments Interface (UPI).
Third party payment gateways pay around Rs 75 lakh-1 Crore for a one-time licensing fee to integrate with IRCTC’s website and mobile app and in return share revenues with IRCTC on every transaction that goes through them.
However, none of the payment gateways have commented on the impact of such a move by IRCTC. IRCTC has not responded to Entrackr’s queries on the recent development till the publication of the report.
Being a major client to most of the digital payment companies, the effect of IRCTC bringing its own digital payment gateway will be major considering the large number of e-ticketing transactions the platform provides to these companies.
