Goes live with 21 banks

NEW DELHI: National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), the umbrella organisation for all retail payments system in India, on Thursday said that the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) was live for customers of 21 banks.

UPI is a payments solution that empowers a recipient to initiate the payment requests from a smartphone.

Built on top of the IMPS (Immediate Payment Service platform), UPI needs to have the beneficiary’s UPI ID — a virtual identity like an email address. This could be your name, or your phone number, so for example, if your phone number is 1234567890, then your virtual address could be 1234567890@sbi (if your bank is SBI) or 1234567890@icici (if you’re an ICICI bank customer), and so on.

It does all that mobile wallets can do including payment for miscellaneous expenses like paying utility bills, over-the -counter payments, barcodebased payments, donations and school fees among others.

Outgoing Reserve Bank of India governor Raghuram Rajan had announced the pilot of UPI on April 11, 2016. UPI was run for the last few months as a pilot with employee-customers. The purpose of the pilot run “was to ensure that technical glitches, if any, are fixed and the product gives a smooth experience for immediate pay.”

“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,” AP Hota, MD and CEO of NPCI, said.

The relevant details of the service would be available on the website of 21 banks.

Analysts have also appreciated the launch of the new payments interface. “UPI is an unique world-class platform aimed at removing friction faced by customers during payments and an important step in India’s journey of reducing cash and improving inclusion,” Vivek Belgavi, leader at the FinTech division of PwC India, said.