India’s Unified Payments Interface a live wire
Unified Payments Interface (UPI), launched in April by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), is going live for 21 banks.
UPI offers instant, online bank payments, and is seen as a major change to the Indian financial sector. It enables banks to provide real-time payments through QR code enabled addresses and offers device fingerprinting for additional security.
Abhaya Prasad Hota, MD and CEO, NPCI, says: “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.”
As Banking Technology reported in July, a number of banks were onboarded. For the last few months it has been on a pilot run mainly with employees and customers.
After assessing the “success” of the pilot run, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) gave their final approval for the public launch.
NPCI decided that only banks with 1,000 pilot customers, 5,000 transactions and a success rate of around 80% would be permitted to go live. It says such a threshold criteria helped the banks to refine their systems and procedure.
Banks providing UPI enabled mobile app on Google Play Store:
Andhra Bank, Axis Bank, Bank of Maharashtra, Bhartiya Mahila Bank, Canara Bank, Catholic Syrian Bank, DCB Bank, Federal Bank, ICICI Bank, TJSB Sahakari Bank, Oriental Bank of Commerce, Karnataka Bank, UCO Bank, Union Bank of India, United Bank of India, Punjab National Bank, South Indian Bank, Vijaya Bank and Yes Bank.
Issuers:
IDBI Bank and RBL Bank are on-boarded as issuers. It enables their customers to download any UPI enabled apps.
