NPCI launches new UPI features to achieve 100 bn monthly transactions; details here

(From Left to Right) Mr. Nandan Nilekani, Chairman Infosys and Advisor to NPCI, Mr. Shaktikanta Das, Governor, RBI, and Mr. Biswamohan Mahapatra, Chairman NPCI

National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) on September 6 launched a slew innovative products which will catapult the payments giant Unified Payments Interface (UPI) to achieve 100 billion transactions a month. These products include credit line on UPI, conversational payment mode ‘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 organisation also revised its target from 30 billion transactions a month to 100 billion on the back of 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, far expected expectations. It has set the stage for national information utilities. Using NPCI as the template we have several bodies now of similar structures whether it is GSTM for taxes, Digi yatra app, ONDC. All these other tech companies we have set up in India on non-profit basis to create on digital public infrastructure, use NPCI’s model. Hope they too will add value."

“In India, we are going from an offline informal low productivity economy to a 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 formalisation of India,” he added.

Further, Nilekani believes a few things have made this a reality: digital infrastructures like Aadhaar and UPI and also entrepreneurs. He shared, in 2016, there were 1,000 startups in India and in 2023, there are 100,000 startups – a 10X growth.

Das said, "The success of UPI is reflected in the sheer
numbers, as it has scaled up in relatively a short period of time. More
than 10 billion transactions for over Rs. 15 trillion value were carried out
in August 2023. This number is steadily rising and India’s technology stack
has accelerated digitalisation through mobile phones and 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 that happened in the world! 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 line on UPI, scan the QR code through your UPI-linked app for buying the product you want to purchase, select bank you want, enter amount and choose credit line. It’s live with a few public sector and private sector banks at the moment. Payment apps it’s live on include Bhim, Paytm, Payzapp and GPay.

Hello UPI – the conversational payment mode, understands language and silence, 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 active network or internet that too with a tap between phones, if they are near-field communication (NFC) enabled. Actual money transfer will happen as soon as either of the phones enter a network zone.

How UPI Tap & Pay Works

UPI Tap & Pay, probably the most interesting of these features involve tiny cards which have near-field communication (NFC) chips within which get 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, the UPI id then gets verfied and linked to a card. The card then comes out immediately and can be stuck to mobile phones for tap-based payments.