Mumbai August 27 2016: National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), the umbrella organisation for all retail payments system in India has announced that the long awaited simplified mobile payments system -- Unified Payments Interface (UPI) -- has gone live for customers of 21 banks in India.
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 and works on single click 2 factor authentication. 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 thecounter payments, barcode (scan and pay) based payments, donations, school fees and other such unique and innovative use cases
The interface is the advanced version IMPS which is a 24X7 funds transfer service. UPI will allow a customer to have multiple virtual addresses for multiple accounts in various banks. In order to ensure privacy of customer‟s data, there is no account number mapper anywhere other than the customer's own bank. This allows the customer to freely share the financial address with others. A customer can also decide to use the mobile number as the name instead of the short name for the virtual address like 1234567890@xyz.
“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 A.P. Hota, MD & CEO, NPCI.
Banks providing UPI enabled mobile app on Google Play Store: Andhra Bank, Axis Bank, Bank of Maharashtra, Bhartiya Mahila Bank, Canara Bank, Catholic Syrian Bank, DCB Bank, Federal Bank, ICICI Bank, TJSB Sahakari Bank, Oriental Bank of Commerce, Karnataka Bank, UCO Bank, Union Bank of India, United Bank of India, Punjab National Bank, South Indian Bank, Vijaya Bank and YES Bank.