Evolving E-Money Saga

There is a life after plastic in the age of the Internet and online transactions. Time was when credit and debit cards grabbed space from cash. Now, it seems, it is time for plastics to cede space. This time, the wallet has jumped to the mobile handset.

E-commerce is passe. Two developments last week signalled milestones in the next big wave in India's I\internet economy. The first was Ratan Tata's investment-cum-advisory interest in PayTM, a mobile payment firm spun off by One97 Communications, and the other was a report that e-commerce startup giant Snapdeal is in advanced talks to acquire Freecharge for what seems like a mind-boggling amount of Rs 2,800 crore for a company that only sells you recharge services with some fancy discounts and freebies thrown in.

As a mechanism for efficient, secure, and trusted exchange, money is becoming increasingly digital. As advances in information and communication technologies (ICTs) extend and amplify the circuits of global finance, they are also changing the everyday lived experience of money from one of face-to-face cash transactions to one of computer-mediated representations, encounters, and transductions. Rather than replacing cash and coin, or arriving at one new general-purpose form of money, these changes in ICTs and multiple agendas for innovation in money are accelerating its pluralization. Multiple currencies commingle in people's wallets, restructuring people's experience of money as well as their everyday practices of budgeting and accounting. If e-money is issued on credit, there is a possibility that the issuers may assume a leveraged position. There is, therefore, a need for continuous monitoring of the behaviour of issuing authorities for balanced growth of their assets and liabilities, particularly liabilities arising out of issuance of e-money.

E Wallet is subject to synergy of :
- M-banking, m-payment, and electronic remittance systems
- Design tradeoffs; e.g., security/accountability vs. accessibility/empowerment
- Financial literacies and numeracies
- Regulatory conflicts and opportunities
- Formal and informal experimentation with new electronic moneys
- Connections to physical and virtual mobilities

There are two things to be noted here. The year 2016 may belong to e-money, with many of these fancy discount and recharge companies taking your cash and playing it with the way banks do. E-commerce players will become something like "fast-moving technology trick" companies to generate high volumes using consumer research and software.

The better flipper wins. It is not an easy game.