Unified Payments Interface goes live with 21 banks

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, August 25

The use of a smartphone for payments has become a reality with the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), the umbrella organisation for all retail payments system in India, announcing that the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) is going live for customers with 21 banks.

UPI had a soft launch on April 11 which was announced by outgoing RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan. For the past few months, it was under pilot run mainly with employee-customers.

“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 AP Hota, CEO, NPCI.

The list of banks which are going live with UPI include PNB, Oriental Bank of Commerce, Axis Bank, Canara Bank, ICICI Bank, UCO Bank, Union Bank of India, Vijaya Bank and YES Bank.

UPI is a unique payment solution which empowers a recipient to initiate the payment request from a smartphone. It facilitates ‘virtual payment address’ as a payment identifier for sending and collecting money.

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 among others.

After assessing the success of pilot run, RBI had accorded its final approval for public launch of the product. NPCI had decided that only the banks with 1,000 pilot customers, 5,000 transactions and success rate of around 80% would be permitted to go live. Such a threshold criteria helped banks to refine their systems and procedure. 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.