Online ticketing website IRCTC to gets its own payment gateway within a few weeks: Report

Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corp ( **IRCTC** ) is planning to launch its own payment gateway. Currently, the payment gateway of the ticketing website of Indian Railways is powered by  companies such as Razorpay, **Mobikwik** and **Paytm** . A payment gateway is a platform that facilitates online transactions between a website and a bank. [caption id=“attachment_4302427” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Representational image. AFP[/caption] According to a report on LiveMint, the new payment gateway is internally called as ‘ipay’ and is aimed at reducing the dependency on third-party payment services. The payment service will be rolled out in phases in 4 to 8 weeks after the testing is successfully done. The report mentioned that the website sells over 1.2 million tickets a month. Payment websites which are used to book tickets such as Razorpay, Mobikwik and Paytm share revenues with IRCTC after paying an initial licensing fee. The licensing fee is between Rs 75 lakh to Rs 1 crore. The new move is expected to help IRCTC generate more revenue. The payment gateway companies work with IRCTC to get “access to high volume of transactions” apart from the revenue they share with the website, the report mentioned. IRCTC recently completed its PCI-DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) compliance, an information security standard for organisations that handle branded credit cards. It is expected to offer its payment gateway service to the state and central department (includes Life Insurance Corp. of India and Employees Provident Fund Organisation), e-catering portal and tourism platform. The online ticketing website is said to be working with a start-up, MMAD Communications, which is providing technology and back-end support. The IRCTC’s report says that ticketing platform sold 573,000 e-tickets daily between 2016-2017. The move to bring own payment gateway for the ticketing website will affect the companies which handle it currently. None of the companies have responded on the impacts of the new move by IRCTC.