NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Wednesday, June 10, 2015

Mumbai-based Nikita Mathur, 23, a hotel management trainee, uses a prepaid wallet for payments. “I started using Uber taxi service from April. My brother showed me how to load money. The fare automatically gets debited from this wallet,” said Mathur, who uses the taxi service frequently. “I just refill money from my bank account. Before using this service, I had only seen advertisements for wallets on hoardings,” she said.

Knowingly or unknowingly, over the past few years, we have adopted various new ways of making payments, be it for monthly bills, shopping, commute, and even sending money to our loved ones. The move has been away from paper and towards digital.

As more and more people go digital, we take a look at the various platforms and interfaces that have come up recently. Mint takes a look at six broad ways to make payments, based on convenience, cost efficiency and usage.