Bangalore, February 14 2016: The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), the umbrella organisation for all retail payment systems in the country is providing a platform for start-ups/developers community to accelerate innovations in payments arena by launching Unified Payment Interface (UPI)Hackathon in association with Indian Software Product Industry Round Table (iSPIRT).The Hackathon will be conducted in multiple tracks primarily for two categories - Software based problem solving – online or onsite event version and Workshop format to solve a real life problem that is plaguing the industry.
Participants  will  use the API provided in the sandbox (set of rules that programmers need to use) to develop products/services to generate multiple solution options for each of the perspectives. An eminent panel of jury from iSPIRT and NPCI will evaluate the submissions. 
UPI is the next generation payment system and it has the potential to revolutionise retail payments in India. A key feature of UPI is that it would provide interoperable and instant payments driven over the mobile platform. Besides that a customer will be able to make payments by providing just a single identifier like Aadhaar number or a virtual address.UPI will offer architecture and set of APIs to facilitate the next generation online immediate payments. It will leverage trends such as increasing smartphone adoption, deepening penetration of mobile data, Indian language interfaces etc. UPI will empower users to perform both push and pull transactions seamlessly which will transform the way customers will make payments in the coming months.     
The event was launched  yesterday by  Nandan Nilekani, Honorary Advisor to NPCI along with Balachandran M, Chairman NPCI, A P Hota, MD & CEO, NPCI and key officials of iSPIRT. Over 300 participants comprising of technical team of banks, payments banks and payment solution developer organisations nominated themselves for UPI Hackathon.
“NPCI would support banks and solution providers to develop solutions based on the Application Programming Interface (APIs) made available by us”, said Hota.