#UPI - India's fintech achievement

United Payments Interface ( UPI ) is unique payment solution which empowers a recipient to initiate payment request from a smartphone. UPI is India's biggest banking achievement as real time money sending and receiving at such a large scale has not been attempted anywhere in the world. UPI is the gift to #DigitalIndia by National Payment Corporation of India (NPCI), the umbrella organisation for payments in India. NPCI has been featured in 5 brands that made in big in 2016 for their contribution to RuPay and United Payments Interface. NPCI says that UPI is now live and is available for the customers of 21 banks. State Bank of India is expected to launch their UPI app next month.

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. It also provides an option for scheduling push and pull transactions for various purposes like sharing bills among peers. 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 and other such unique and innovative use cases.

United Payment Interface would be a big boost for fin-tech startups. Bengaluru based Ultra Cash are trying to implement a cash-less society at petrol pumps, mobile recharge centres and cafes through NFC based payments. UltraCash's team were successful in writing code to integrate their mobile payment platform with UPI. It would enable consumers to easily pay retail merchants from their phone. But their innovation does not need an internet connection. UltraCash's technology securely transfers payment data from one device to another, using sound waves with frequencies inaudible to humans.

UPI is currently available only on Android devices. To its optimum use, NPCI plans to introduce the same on other platforms including iOS, Windows and Indus OS. 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.

The inclusion of UPI with upcoming payment banks would enable cash-less society. Startups or big business would prefer digital payment over cash for accountability purposes. In future, we can use UPI for Cash on Delivery. It will be helpful for paying your Ola bills. Digital payments will bring down costs and thus we can see heavy discount on amount paid using UPI instead of cash. India has achieved what developed countries couldn't think of. With Jan Dhan, Aadhaar and Mobile (JAM), India has the most sophisticated payment system in the world.

- Chaitanya Kulkarni ( twitter.com/chai2kul )