Digitalisation can expose consumers to impulsive spending, data breaches: RBI report

Digitalisation can also create a more complex and interconnected financial system with implications for financial stability.

“While improving accessibility and convenience of financial services for customers, digitalisation raises concerns related to impulsive spending, herd behaviour and data security,” the report said.

Digital platforms enable quick dissemination of financial trends and choices, allowing information about investments, spending habits, and financial products to spread rapidly across social networks, it said.

When customers observe large groups engaging in certain financial activities, such as mass buying or selling of stocks during a market frenzy, they are more likely to follow the crowd.

Similarly, driven by herd behaviour, depositors may withdraw their money from banks, leading to potential bank runs or failures, the survey said.

In terms of data breaches, the survey said that the average cost of data breaches in India stood at $2.18 million in 2023, a 28 per cent increase since 2020 albeit less than the global average cost of data breach. The most common attacks in India are phishing (22 per cent), followed by stolen or compromised credentials (16 per cent), the report said.

The report said that digitalisation can impact inflation and output dynamics, and monetary policy transmission in diverse manners and the overall impact could vary over time given the fast pace of developments.

The monetary policy impact could be dampened if digitalisation leads to shifting of credit supply from banks to less-regulated / unregulated nonbanks, or by offsetting reductions in bank deposits

“In this environment, central banks would need to incorporate digitalisation aspects comprehensively into their models for the continued efficacy of monetary policy and the achievement of their price and financial stability goals,” the report said.

The RBI has been undertaking proactive policy measures to harness the benefits of digitalisation while mitigating the emerging risks of digitisation in the financial sector.

The report, however, said that digitalisation can provide a strong boost to India’s external trade in goods and services, given the country’s relative comparative advantage in modern services exports, which are not conditional upon the geographical proximity of the trading partners.

Digitalisation in international payment systems has the potential to reduce the cost of receiving remittances, thereby leading to higher remittances and income or savings for the recipients.

Earlier this month, the RBI joined Project Nexus, a multilateral international initiative to enable instant cross-border retail payments by interlinking domestic Fast Payments System (FPS). As part of the project, the country’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and FPSs of Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand will be interlinked through Nexus.

Last year, the country’s real-time retail payment system Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and its equivalent network in Singapore PayNow got integrated, to enable faster remittances between the two countries at a competitive rate. The RBI and the Central Bank of UAE (CBUAE) had also signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) for cooperation for interlinking UPI of India with Instant Payment Platform (IPP) of UAE.

The RBI’s report further said that cross-border digital trade policies would play a crucial role in harnessing new opportunities, building trust, and facilitating coordination on regulatory aspects like data security and cybersecurity. The internationalisation of the rupee is also progressing backed by a comprehensive and integrated policy approach, it said.

The report said that the UPI has seen a tenfold increase in volume over the past four years, increasing from 12.5 billion transactions in 2019-20 to 131 billion transactions in 2023-24 – 80 per cent of all digital payment volumes. Currently, the UPI is recording nearly 14 billion transactions a month, buoyed by 424 million unique users in June 2024.