Mastercard and CAIT embark on the ‘Digital Apnao Vyapar Badhao’ campaign

Mastercard and Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT) announced a 90-day ‘Digital Apnao Vyapar Badhao’ campaign to accelerate the adoption of digital payments amongst traders and enabling them to grow their businesses.

As part of the campaign, CAIT and Mastercard will organize 500 camps across 30 cities in India over a period of 90 days. The ‘Digital Apnao Vyapar Badhao’ campaign aims to on-board five lakh merchants and traders by bringing together financial institutions and other payments facilitators under one roof. The camps will follow a three step process of completing KYC documents, opening merchant accounts and helping them adopt the right digital payment solutions for their business. The nationwide campaign is in line with the government’s ‘Digital India’ vision and will help widen the payments acceptance network across the country.

Announcing the new initiative, Ravi Aurora, Senior Vice President, Global Policy Affairs and Community Relations, Mastercard, said, “We share the Government’s vision of creating a less-cash economy and bringing more people under the ambit of financial inclusion. The ‘Digital Apnao Vyapar Badhao’ campaign that we are launching today is in line with our commitment to create awareness about the benefits of a less-cash economy and the opportunity that new payments technology can bring to the untapped SME sector.”

Praveen Khandelwal, Secretary General, CAIT, said, “There is an immediate need to build a strong acceptance infrastructure in the country and programs like ‘Digital Apnao Vyapar Badhao’ will go a long way in ensuring that the traders and merchants have access to the right information and solutions as they embark on the digital payments journey to be future ready and to grow their businesses. We are also in conversation with the Government to incentivize the use of digital payments in the Country as we believe it will accelerate the adoption by many folds. "

The campaign is in continuation to Mastercard and CAIT’s partnership to promote financial awareness and literacy amongst traders through educational training sessions ‘Master Your Card’ across the country. Since 2015, Mastercard and CAIT have organized over 150 seminars, conferences, round-tables and workshops in over 30 cities across different states and reached over 2 lakh traders to promote the adoption of electronic payments by the trader community. The success of the partnership can be measured by the fact that its recommendations of incentivizing usage of
digital payments, service tax relief to merchants, fee for deploying POS terminals be subsidized/waived off, and nationwide awareness campaign on benefits and adoption of digital payments was considered by the government.

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