India's first own payment service network, Rupay is expected to take a launch in the upcoming 18 months. The project is being handled by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI). Rupay when introduced will come as a competition to payment service majors, MasterCard and Visa.

"Our consultant has just started working. It would review the strategy document that we had prepared internally, and is expected to take six-eight weeks. Much would depend on the timeline that it suggests and discuss with us and we will freeze that. But we would like it to happen as quickly as possible...it should not take more than 18 months for at least the debit and prepaid (cards) to come up," NPCI Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer AP Hota said.

The need and the urge for setting up such a payment system which is India's own was set by regulator, Reserve Bank of India. The reason being, "the high cost borne by Indian banks for affiliation with international card associations, in the absence of a domestic price setter".

Due to collaboration with foreign card associations, the resultant was "the need for routing even domestic transactions, which account for more than 90 per cent of the total, through a switch located outside the country."

The card when introduced is also aimed to be launched in the international platform and for that NPCI plans to work with the gloabl card associations. "We have expressed our intention of building international acceptance of the RuPay card. Obviously, for international acceptance, we need partners who can make it happen. The card associations can do this and it would be quicker this way. We can also talk to different large acquiring companies, but that would be a slow process. We are evaluating which is the right way. Aligning ourselves or working with international card associations would definitely be a simpler route," Hota said.

In the domestic domain, NPCI says it is all ready. "If the card is to be accepted only in the country, we don't need anything, since we have a block of 500 IINs (issuer identification numbers). We can populate the IINs in over 550,000 POS (points of sale) terminals and can get going," said Hota. "The real issue is how would this card be accepted abroad. Aspirations in the country are so high that if we give a purely domestic card, people might not accept it," he said.

However, whether to accept it or other payment services, will be at the banks' discretion. "The banks would choose. If they feel there is a customer segment which would not use the global card, or the likelihood of using it is limited, they might issue a card which is domestic. It would also be cost-effective, since the assessment fee of an international card would definitely be higher than a domestic card," he said.