We are always transacting money in one form or another, for one reason or another. The year of 2016 has demonstrated and reinforced the importance and ubiquitousness of payments. We saw the launch of UPI (Unified Payments Interface) to make inter-bank transactions simpler. We also witnessed turmoil and transition in the Indian economy following the demonetization of large currency notes.

Overall, 2016 has left us with several questions about the payments landscape:

• Will UPI change the payments landscape in India as more and more banks and payment gateways adopt it?
• What happens to the regulatory environment in payments when influential bodies such as the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) compete with wallets and other payments businesses?
• How are banks, and payment switches such as Mastercard, Visa and RuPay coping with the push towards digitization? What changes do we foresee with respect to transaction fees, and therefore further adoption (or resistance) of cards and POS solutions among individuals and small businesses?
• How do we authenticate as well as secure identity and personal data when doubts surround existing systems – be they Aadhar, debit card PINs, online e-commerce transactions and secure OTPs?
• What innovations can we expect for POS (Point of Sales) solutions – technological interventions among existing credit and trust networks – as small businesses adopt technology to deal with cash and digital payments?

These, and many more questions, raise hopes and doubts about the payments ecosystem.

50p is an intervention in this landscape. Our goal is to help stakeholders understand the existing system, and to network and collaborate with each other as payment systems in India and across the world evolve in the coming years.

50p is not just a conference. It is an attempt to build a larger community whose members will learn from each other, and collaborate in negotiating the payments ecosystem in efforts ranging from building payment solutions to securing individual privacy.

Who should attend 50p conf?

• Developers.
• Businesses – whether in the payments sector or allied areas such as e-commerce.
• Stakeholders from banking, government and regulatory sectors.
• Members of interest groups working to promote technology, payments and startups.

What you should expect from the first edition?

The first edition of 50p is a learning conference with talks and discussions covering three broad areas:

1. How do payment systems work in India and elsewhere? What are the costs of transactions under different systems for merchants and customers? What regulations surround each system and how do these impact adoption?

   Here, we will learn about NEFT, IMPS, SWIFT, wallets, banking systems, cross border funds, and systems part of the payments mesh.

2. Identity and authentication: what are the key issues surrounding authentication of individual identity for online and offline transactions? What alternatives do identity brokers, Blockchain and emerging systems offer for contracts and pseudo-anonymity between merchants, customers, banks and government?
3. Payments as a scale problem: here we will discuss how cash works – in terms of value, abstraction, trust and networks – in order to learn that any intervention in the payments landscape is an intervention of scale.

50p is a two-track conference consisting of talks, Birds of Feather (BoF) sessions and demos.

Speakers will include practitioners who have had experience working in the payments ecosystem – including working with governments, regulatory bodies and banks, and creators of technology solutions and products for payments.