The advantage of recurring payments

One of the best things about payments in the UK is the ubiquity of the direct debit system. From gym memberships to contact lenses to television licenses, all sorts of subscriptions are sold on a direct debit based model.

The mechanism is simple – the merchant, with the consent of the customer, sets up a direct debit system with the customer’s account such that a specified amount is debited periodically. This direct debit system can be cancelled at the customer’s discretion, resulting in automatic annulment of the subscription.

This is a great business model because it allows businesses to acquire customers for a repeated transaction, without the latter having to commit for too long a period.

The key feature of the direct debit system is the customer opt out. That the account will be continued by default means that it takes explicit action by the user to terminate the subscription, which helps the business acquire customers with the cost amortised over several time periods. The any time opt-out feature (which the user can do at her bank’s website or app, without consent of the merchant) means that the commitment at any time for the customer is for one period only, making the product an easier sell.

In the absence of the recurring payment based model, the business will either have to offer short term “subscriptions”, which implies a customer acquisition cost at each period, or long term contracts, which takes a higher upfront commitment from the customer making it a much harder sell.

In that sense, a recurring payment model offers a nice middle ground, resulting in value being unlocked for both the business and the customer, resulting in enhanced welfare all around.

In that sense, the lack of a recurring payments system is a key shortcoming of the payments scene in India. While it was possible to do this earlier, current rules by the Reserve Bank of India require authorisation by the customer (in the form of two factor authentication) for every transaction, making them opt-in rather than opt-out (the opt-out feature is key to amortise customer acquisition cost).

The updated version of the unified payments interface (UPI 2.0) was supposed to offer this recurring feature, but media reports say that the update is being rolled out without this feature. That is surely an opportunity missed for India’s businesses to grow.