India’s cashless payments service gets closer to reality

The Unified Payments Interface (UPI) of the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), the umbrella organisation for all retail payments system in India, will now be available to customers with 21 banks following the successful soft launch in April that ironed out all the technical hitches.

Customers will have a smooth experience for immediate ‘Pay’ and ‘Collect’ with Virtual Payment Address (VPA).

The UPI also provides an option for scheduling push and pull transactions for various purposes like sharing bills among peers. One can use UPI app instead of paying cash on delivery on receipt of product from online shopping websites and can pay for miscellaneous expenses like paying utility bills, over the counter payments, barcode (scan and pay) based payments, donations, school fees and other such unique and innovative use cases.

“This is a success of enormous significance. Real-time sending and receiving money through a mobile application at such a scale on interoperable basis had not been attempted anywhere else in the world. Now the UPI App will be made available on Google Play Store by banks,” said Mr A.P. Hota, MD & CEO, NPCI.

RBI had accorded their final approval for public launch of the product after assessing the success of pilot run.

NPCI had decided that only the banks with 1,000 pilot customers, 5,000 transactions and success rate of around 80 per cent would be permitted to go live. Such a threshold criteria helped banks to refine their systems and procedure, said Mr Hota.

The UPI app of 19 banks will be available on the Google Play Store in next two to three working days for the customers to download and start using.

The relevant details of the service would be available on the website of 21 banks that include Andhra Bank, Union Bank of India, Vijaya Bank, ICICI Bank, Mahila Bank and UCO Bank.