Digital Payments - An Innovation in Financial Services

India has traditionally been an economy obsessed by cash. With exceptional population demographics and diffident literacy levels, it is a difficult market to digitalise. However, as a consequence of demonetisation, India has been witnessing a new wave of financial technology, with the introduction of innovative products and a wider customer base. Increased penetration has also compelled both the regulators and government to renew their focus on this migration to a cashless society. The new-age client anticipates transactions to be fast, continuous and custom-made. The effortlessness and suitability offered by e-commerce has transformed consumer behaviour, and this has stretched quickly to the payments market as well. Therefore, the sector has experienced drastic changes in the past few years. Payment companies have been progressively capitalising the power of big data, analytics and the cloud to create customer-centric models. This has created a new marketplace, ushering in a new era in the payments market. A number of innovations have occurred in the past five years leveraging mobile devices and connectivity to make payments simpler and more valuable. Examples range from digital wallets to automated machine-to-machine payments. Since the introduction of credit cards in the 1950s, debit cards in the 1980s and the growth of e-commerce through the 1990s, electronic payments have grown in acceptance, put out of place cash and cheques. This paper provides an overview of the status, innovations and all areas of e- finance and applications of the internet technologies to financial service industry. It discusses how organizations could benefit from such innovations and e-finance systems and infrastructure and technology.