National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) on September 6 launched a slew of innovative products that will catapult the payments giant Unified Payments Interface (UPI) to achieve 100 billion monthly transactions. These products include credit lines on UPI, conversational payment modes ‘Hello UPI,’ BillPay Connect, UPI Tap & Pay, and UPI Lite X.
This comes a week after UPI achieved the milestone of processing 10 billion transactions in a month in August. The non-profit organization also revised its target from 30 billion monthly transactions to 100 billion based on these new features.
The offerings were launched in the presence of Shatikanta Das, Governor, Reserve Bank of India (RBI), and Nandan Nilekani, co-founder and non-executive chairman of Infosys, at the Global Fintech Fest in Mumbai on September 6.
Nilekani said, “NPCI is the crown jewel of India’s technology sector. The structure of NPCI, set up by RBI in 2008 as a non-profit company for payments, is far from expected expectations. It has set the stage for national information utilities. Using NPCI as the template, we now have several bodies of similar structures, whether GSTM for taxes, Digi yatra app, or ONDC. All these other tech companies have set up in India on a non-profit basis to create digital public infrastructure using NPCI’s model. Hope they, too, will add value.”
“In India, we are going from an offline informal low productivity economy to an online formal high productivity economy as millions of people join society, get digital IDs, bank accounts, mobile solutions, and use digital capital to get credit. In the next 20 years, we will see huge formalization of India,” he added.
Further, Nilekani believes a few things have made this a reality: digital infrastructures like Aadhaar, UPI, and entrepreneurs. He shared that in 2016, there were 1,000 startups in India, and in 2023, there were 100,000 startups – a 10X growth.
Das said, “The success of UPI is reflected in the sheer numbers, as it has scaled up relatively quickly. More
than 10 billion transactions for over Rs. 15 trillion were carried out in August 2023. This number is steadily rising, and India’s technology stack has accelerated digitalization through mobile phones and the internet.”
In an exclusive interview with Moneycontrol this week, Prime Minister Narendra Modi also spoke about how amazed foreign delegates are when they see “street vendors asking customers to pay through a QR code through UPI.”
“No wonder India accounted for almost half of the real-time digital transactions worldwide! Even other countries are keen on associating with UPI, so much so that Indians find themselves having the option of paying through UPI even outside India!” he said.
How these features work
For credit lines on UPI, scan the QR code through your UPI-linked app to buy the product you want, select the bank you wish to, enter the amount, and choose the credit line. It’s live with a few public sector and private sector banks. Payment apps it’s live on include Bhim, Paytm, Payzapp, and GPay.
Hello UPI – the conversational payment mode, understands language and silence and can convert text into numbers and text to speech.
Meanwhile, feature phone users get an upgrade with UPI Lite X, which will let them do peer-to-peer transactions without an active network or internet, with a tap between phones if they are near-field communication (NFC) enabled. An actual money transfer will happen when either phone enters a network zone.
How UPI Tap & Pay Works
UPI Tap & Pay, probably the most interesting of these features, involves tiny cards with near-field communication (NFC) chips within, which are linked to the user’s unique QR code and UPI ID.
To generate these cards, the user has to go to the nearest partner bank to find a contactless UPI card-generating kiosk. Once the user picks the card design from the designs provided, they scan their QR code, and the UPI ID then gets verified and linked to a card. The card comes out immediately and can be stuck to mobile phones for tap-based payments.
