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Demonetization has businesses scrambling for payment gateways in their websites

It's a good time to be a payment gateway company. After years of slow growth they are now poised for explosive growth. Demonetization has given splendid opportunities to cashless services providers including online payment gateways.

There was a time when there were hardly a couple of payment gateways and getting one for your business was a tough task, with tonnes of paperwork and a long process.

But now companies like Instamojo allow you to accept online payments with a minimum of paperwork and simple interfaces. My local cable operator from whom I take internet services had to suddenly switch from cash to online transactions. He could do so with a minimum of fuss. A few years ago this would have been extremely difficult.

There might be a time, nor far from now, when almost all websites irrespective of industry will have some kind of payment gateway tied up in them. They might be for customers or for partners and could be for all size payments from a few thousand rupees to lakhs. Demonetization has hastened the adoption of online payment gateways for almost all businesses.

There are however a lot of challenges that need to be addressed before online payments become the new normal. Failure rates of transactions through the online gateway are very high, either due to poor infrastructure or with connectivity to bank networks. This has to be rectified on a war footing.

Secondly, the professionalism of the credit card gateway companies has to to improve. With a few exceptions, most have horrible documentation and very poor customer support systems. Some even have very poor sales system.

Another factor involves due diligence. A bonafide client of ours, an institution of almost 50 years, was rejected by an online payment gateway due to the nature of the transactions they wanted to make through the site. Basically they go rejected on a technicality. This too has to change.

For web design and development firms such as ours it's a lot of new work from both existing and new clients. We have to act as enablers between the client and the gateways. If we do our jobs right, we can change the landscape of the online industry and enable our clients to usher in a new cashless reality.