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Ask HN: What is wrong with Reserve Bank of India?

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Re: Ask HN: What is wrong with Reserve Bank of India?

#71

Post by shrikrishna »

lucaspiller wrote: post #63
kazinator wrote: post #39

Kudos to RBI for not supporting pre-authorized credit-card transactions. These are a stupid idea. Consumers, never sign up for that crap, even if there are incentives. If you are charged some extra fee, you will not be able to get it back, because you authorized the contract. I almost got charged a superfluous $600 fee this way. Only, the foolhardy merchant sent me advance notice that this charge is coming to my cred…

> They will have to send people bills by e-mail (or perhaps even snail mail) and await payment, like any other honest business. Then suspend the account if it is in arrears for more than X days. How do services like Netflix and Spotify work in India? In the UK I pay Netflix £6.99 a month (about the price of two coffees), and I'd get rather annoyed if I had to send them a cheque for that amount every month :D

Simple. They don't work in India.

Re: Ask HN: What is wrong with Reserve Bank of India?

#72

Post by superasn »

programmer_dude wrote: post #7

>In India, you cannot create recurring subscriptions as the RBI prohibits charging the credit card automatically. I am really happy that this is how it is. There is no shortage of cheats and frauds in India. Thanks to the RBI I can rest easy without worrying about getting (unsanctioned) charges on my credit card from shady businesses. The RBI does provide an alternate means for supporting recurring bills. If you are…

Maybe you're skeptical but if everyone thought like this, here is a small list of things I wouldn't be able to do which I'm really thankful for:

1) AWS bills me automatically every month for the hosting. I'm totally fine with it and kinda happy they do it.

2) Namecheap renews my domains for me (the ones I've setup on auto-renew). I'm happy they do it because I'm traveling a lot.

3) Paying for services like Uber with my credit card sounds nice. The process seemed really effortless.

4) I'm sure I can think many more things where this is a convenience for the customer.

> Thanks to the RBI I can rest easy without worrying about getting (unsanctioned) charges on my credit card from shady businesses.

There are cheats and there is a system for dealing with cheats. It's the same everywhere (419 scammers are not from India). You don't unplug from the internet on Windows just because there are a tonne of viruses for Windows. You install an anti-virus or firewall for that.

> If you are a business in India try looking into the ECS option:

I know about the ECS option but that really doesn't work very well with online business. As far as I know you need a Void check from the customer and there is paperwork (AFAIK). Also what about international customers, just because you're based here does not stop you from having those.

Re: Ask HN: What is wrong with Reserve Bank of India?

#73

Post by superasn »

arihant wrote: post #23

I don't see how unsecured CC is good for us. Credit card fraud raises national debt, makes your economy reliant on derivatives such as insurance and in the end you fall down. Maybe US economy could sustain derivative based approach because of it's size, but India would be in much worse position if something like 2008 happened here. Now, that said, this could be an opportinity for a startup, so stop complaining for a…

> Also SaaS has nothing to do with recurring CC. Don't you use postpaid services in India? Generate an invoice and give someone a week to pay. I mean if it's good enough for other service providers, why not for SaaS? Just use a shorter payment deadline.

SaaS has a lot to do with recurring CC. If you've ever done landing page optimization you know how much changing the color of headline or moving a few pixels around can boost your conversions. Hell, people have stated that by just putting that no-good "McAfee secured" logo on their payment page increases their conversions by 50%.

Now imagine that instead of that I ask you that please mail me a blank voided check and a print out a consent form, fill it, sign it and mail it (that how I've enabled ECS for my internet) on the checkout page. Don't you think my conversions will be 1/10th after it?

Also subscription billing is not always bad: Namecheap, and AWS are two services I'm really glad can bill me and keep my domain and hosting alive while I'm traveling.

Re: Ask HN: What is wrong with Reserve Bank of India?

#74

Post by thisisit »

superasn wrote: post #72
programmer_dude wrote: post #7

>In India, you cannot create recurring subscriptions as the RBI prohibits charging the credit card automatically. I am really happy that this is how it is. There is no shortage of cheats and frauds in India. Thanks to the RBI I can rest easy without worrying about getting (unsanctioned) charges on my credit card from shady businesses. The RBI does provide an alternate means for supporting recurring bills. If you are…

Maybe you're skeptical but if everyone thought like this, here is a small list of things I wouldn't be able to do which I'm really thankful for: 1) AWS bills me automatically every month for the hosting. I'm totally fine with it and kinda happy they do it. 2) Namecheap renews my domains for me (the ones I've setup on auto-renew). I'm happy they do it because I'm traveling a lot. 3) Paying for services like Uber with…

ECS doesn't require a void check. The electricity bill which you might be paying via your credit card on a monthly basis is an ECS payment.

The only problem here is as a business you cannot set it up for a customer, like the AWS bill because "ECS Credit can be used to pay interest, dividends...." (pay; not charge)

Customer needs to add and set it up on his own, so thats a bummer for sure.

Re: Ask HN: What is wrong with Reserve Bank of India?

#75

Post by alok-g »

Tarang wrote: post #17
programmer_dude wrote: post #7

>In India, you cannot create recurring subscriptions as the RBI prohibits charging the credit card automatically. I am really happy that this is how it is. There is no shortage of cheats and frauds in India. Thanks to the RBI I can rest easy without worrying about getting (unsanctioned) charges on my credit card from shady businesses. The RBI does provide an alternate means for supporting recurring bills. If you are…

> There is no shortage of cheats and frauds in India. I would argue any place can have cheats. That's why you can reverse and dispute card transactions if they are fraudulent.

Need to think it through. People (in India) may readily start reversing/disputing actual transactions they made. Such hacks are not uncommon there.

Re: Ask HN: What is wrong with Reserve Bank of India?

#76

Post by kamaal »

alok-g wrote: post #75
Tarang wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is no shortage of cheats and frauds in India. I would argue any place can have cheats. That's why you can reverse and dispute card transactions if they are fraudulent.

Need to think it through. People (in India) may readily start reversing/disputing actual transactions they made. Such hacks are not uncommon there.

Agreed, this has lot to do with social evolution than government policy.

'X country has it, why can't we' is a useless argument here. If only Indians acted with same degree of responsibility, you could do away with a lot of things.

Re: Ask HN: What is wrong with Reserve Bank of India?

#77

Post by [deleted] »

Tarang wrote: post #29
scotty79 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recurrent payments make possible softer kinds of frauds where you extract money from people for services they don't need or use only because they forgot they ordered them or can't be bothered to cancel.

If its a fraud its a fraud you can get your money back. There's a difference between being cheated and wanting the service & being willing to pay for it. I might point out on Paypal you get an email every time a charge is done and you can easily cancel any subscription in under a minute quite easily so you wont forget about anything. Direct Debit (such as that offered by HDFC, Axis, etc) can also do the same thing, a…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What is wrong with Reserve Bank of India?

#78

Post by kamaal »

Tarang wrote: post #29
scotty79 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recurrent payments make possible softer kinds of frauds where you extract money from people for services they don't need or use only because they forgot they ordered them or can't be bothered to cancel.

If its a fraud its a fraud you can get your money back. There's a difference between being cheated and wanting the service & being willing to pay for it. I might point out on Paypal you get an email every time a charge is done and you can easily cancel any subscription in under a minute quite easily so you wont forget about anything. Direct Debit (such as that offered by HDFC, Axis, etc) can also do the same thing, a…

>>If its a fraud its a fraud you can get your money back.

Sorry, but in a country where credit card companies send the local mafia after a person if they miss a few EMI's. No one is realistically going to trust 'dispute the transaction, get your money back' promise.

There will be so much fraud from both the ends, it will be hard to bring the chaos in control.

India needs a lot of social evolution before you could trust the public with these things. We can't even discard a biscuit packet properly, let alone these kind of things.

Re: Ask HN: What is wrong with Reserve Bank of India?

#79

Post by droidist2 »

guruparan18 wrote: post #68
programmer_dude wrote: post #7

>In India, you cannot create recurring subscriptions as the RBI prohibits charging the credit card automatically. I am really happy that this is how it is. There is no shortage of cheats and frauds in India. Thanks to the RBI I can rest easy without worrying about getting (unsanctioned) charges on my credit card from shady businesses. The RBI does provide an alternate means for supporting recurring bills. If you are…

Dude... you just violated the RBI policy by linking their web page. Read: /scripts/disclaimer.aspx Links to this Web Site from other web sites Except as set forth below, caching and links to, and the framing of this Web Site or any of the contents are prohibited. Linking to the Home Page - You may link to the Home Page of this Web Site, http://www.rbi.org.in upon notifying RBI in writing. For hyper-Linking to an inte…

What's the reasoning behind the policy against linking to them? That seems crazy.

Re: Ask HN: What is wrong with Reserve Bank of India?

#80

Post by anuragsrathor »

I, on the other hand would say that things are better than before. And moreover, the no of credit card frauds is one of the lowest as compared to other countries.

It would be a bit more naive to say that RBI's policies are the worst, because these are the same policies which were much appreciated by the financial world during the 2008/2009 financial meltdown.

Yes, the policies are a lot difficult and sometimes does not makes sense. But it has been designed and implemented to be one of the robust financial systems in the world.

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