i-PAY, the in-house payment gateway of the Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC), is processing over 1,25,000 transactions every day. IRCTC told the media that i-PAY enables payments for booking air tickets, railway tickets and tour packages on the IRCTC website and mobile app. i-PAY is one of the several payment gateways available to users on the IRCTC website and mobile apps. An IRCTC statement informed the media that when i-PAY was launched in April 2019, it only made 5.8% of total online rail ticket booking, which increased to 13%. Currently, i-PAY is made live in several business verticals of IRCTC such as Tourism, Air ticketing, i-mudra and e-ticketing. IRCTC officials told the media that currently, there are no plans to extend the i-PAY platform to other eCommerce websites to enable more transactions. IRCTC said recently, it has also launched a new feature of 'Autopay' for the website of IRCTC and mobile app users who are using the i-PAY payment gateway. An IRCTC statement said that a user has to allow for debit to his UPI bank account or other payment instruments through a mandate facility which creates a lien (blocked amount) on his payment instrument in this feature. Additionally, the statement said that the money would be debited for booking a ticket only once the waitlist under the Tatkal quota is confirmed using this feature. Users can save their account details and let the IRCTC website deduct the ticket booking amount once a confirmed ticket is available to them, and if the Tatkal waitlist ticket remains on the waitlist even after chart preparation, only applicable charges like cancellation charges, IRCTC convenience fee and mandate charges would be deducted from the user's account, and the blocked amount will be released. In addition, if a ticket is not confirmed, the blocked amount can be used to book another one, and it would also mean quick refunds. The AutoPay feature also guarantees higher reliability of ticket booking through the pre-authorize mandate as it decreases the user's time in feeding in the payment instrument details at the time of booking as per IRCTC. Image Source