A workshop on the “Online Course on Digital Payments” was organised by FICCI and NITI Aayog on 12th November 2018 under the Chairmanship of Shri Ratan P Watal, Principal Advisor, NITI Aayog and Member Secretary to EAC-PM.The course was developed by International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in collaboration with NITI Aayog and Department of Telecommunications (DoT) with inputs form key stakeholders targeting mid-level Government Officers / Academicians engaged in training.

The course covered various aspects related to Digital Payments such as standards, interoperability, security issues, futuristic trends like distributed ledger technologies, etc. and was divided into three modules. Over 80 participants from various Government Departments / Training Institutions / Academia registered in this programme.

Mr. SudhakarRamasubramanian, MD and CEO, Aditya Birla Idea Payment Bank and Co-Chair, FICCI Fintech Committee delivered the opening remarks at this workshop. Shri Ashish Narayan, Programme Coordinator, ITU Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific then shared the key learnings of this course and provided the overall feedback to the Chair.Shri. B N Satpathy, Senior Consultant, EAC-PM set the context for the workshop and provided a 3-step way forward:

• Based on the experience from the course, training and academic institutions from across India could plan/develop similar courses on Digital payments in their respective institutions;
• NITI Aayog may explore the possibility of using this course as a benchmark and may develop future courses on ICT in collaboration with ITU, DoT and other Ministries on priority topics and
• Good project assignments that are submitted in this course could be invited for presentation, further developed and considered for piloting and support by stakeholders in India.

The key component of this workshop was the presentations on various assignment undertaken by participants. The workshop displayed some of these ideas suggested by participants. During the industry interaction, Members from the fintech fraternity and financial institutions shared some of their insights on how some of these projects can be made more viable and also extended support on the existing technological infrastructure that can be leveraged from the implementation point of view.Shri RatanWatal, Principal Advisor, NITI Aayog and Member Secretary, EAC-PM in his concluding remarks appreciated the collective efforts of institutions involved in this exercise and acknowledged the enthusiasm of various participants who presented their ideas in the workshop. He observed that the online course has not only achieved its objective but also gone beyond it and has produced some innovative ideas for promoting Digital Payments. At the end, he mentioned that there is lot of scope for furthering Digital Payments in the country for which there is a need to organise similar capacity building exercises.

Digital payments capacity building advances standardized training, industry collaboration and piloting to expand interoperable secure payment systems. A capacity building initiative launched an ITU developed online course on digital payments for mid level government officers and academics, covering standards, interoperability, security and emerging technologies. The workshop reviewed participant assignments and industry feedback, proposed that training institutions adopt similar courses, recommended using the course as a benchmark for future ICT training collaborations, and suggested selecting strong projects for further development and piloting with stakeholder support to promote interoperable, secure digital payment systems.