India’s push towards expanding the digital economy offers room for multiple players to grow in the payments ecosystem, said Michael Froman, vice chairman and president, strategic growth at Mastercard.

“Digitisation and expanding the digital economy is good. There is plenty of room for many different types of players in that ecosystem,” Froman, who is a former United States’ G-20 sherpa and in the country to attend the B20 inception meeting here, told ET. He was responding to a query on whether RuPay and Unified Payments Interface (UPI) were a competition to Mastercard in the country.

“There can be multiple ways for people to participate in digital payments. What’s important is as that the system continues to evolve, issues around cyber security and fraud become more important,” he added.

He said the Mastercard sees India as one of its key markets.

“We have invested significantly in India and we see it as one of the most exciting markets in the world precisely for the government’s commitment to digitalization,” he said, adding that Mastercard had offered India its cyber security improvement service as the country ramps up its efforts to increase digitisation of transactions. He said Mastercard was 100% compliant with data localisation norms.

“All our data is on-soil. Irrespective of what future policies are, all Indian data is processed in India and stored in India.”

Froman said Mastercard was also working with India’s CERT-In through capacity building to improve cyber security for payments in the country.

“We have brought cyber experts from many parts of the world to India to help train people on the latest developments in cyber security,” he said.

(The reporter is in Gandhinagar at the invitation of the CII)