INDIA's NPCI to ease inter-mobile payment transactions

In a move that will make mobile-to-mobile transactions practical enough for everyday use, the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) on Thursday launched its Unified Payment Interface (UPI) project. The corporation has signed on RS Software — a payments technology company which, among other things, is helping integrate Apple Pay with merchants. 

Although in principle anyone registered for mobile banking can make payments through the phone even today, the process is so cumbersome and the security requirements so stringent that transactions hardly take place. 

What the UPI does is to aggregate 'identifiers' or tokens from the banks. This identifier — be it mobile number, email id, Aadhaar number or any unique name the accountholder chooses — will be linked to the customer's bank account. The NPCI will also provide banks the technology to complete transactions based on these identifiers alone. 

The second shortcoming of mobile banking is that it does not allow a biller to send a 'pull' request, which is equivalent to the shopkeeper punching in the amount on a card swipe machine. The UPI will allow a shopkeeper to send a demand for, say, Rs 100 to the unique id supplied by the buyer. Then the buyer has to merely accept the request and the transaction is complete. 

According to A P Hota, MD & CEO, NPCI, 18 top banks — including the largest lenders in the private and public sectors — are already on board and many others are expected to join by the end of the year. Hota said that there were a number of uses for the new facility.

SOURCE:TIMESOFINDIA