Mastercard has reportedly lodged a complaint with the US government against Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Mastercard accuses the Prime Minister of using nationalism to endorse the country’s domestic payments network RuPay.
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According to Reuters, Mastercard filed the complaint in June to the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR).
India keeping a hold on RuPay
A document sent by Mastercard vice-president for global public policy Sahra English said that the Prime Minister “associated the use of RuPay cards with nationalism, claiming it serves as ‘kind of national service.’
According to Reuters, more than half of India’s debit and credit cards currently go through the RuPay payment system. This growth of the domestic network is said to have affected the dominance of the US payment firms.
Mastercard note further added: “Increasing rhetoric from the prime minister and government mandates on promotion and preference for RuPay … continues to create market access issues for US payments technology companies.
“The Indian government’s preferential treatment of RuPay coupled with fallacies on pricing must be discontinued.”
Reuters further said that Mastercard noted its support towards Indian government’s initiatives, but did not comment on the USTR note.
This report comes shortly after many payments companies, including Mastercard and Visa, struggled to meet India’s deadline for localisation of transaction data. The deadline ended on 15 October 2018.
RuPay is a debit and credit card payment network developed by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI).
As of July this year, more than 500 million RuPay cards issued by 1100 banks were in circulation. Also, 260 million transactions were being carried out through the network per month.
