Customers of 21 banks can soon use Unified Payments Interface app to send/get money
In a push
to a cash-less economy, National Payments Corporation of India’s Unified
Payments Interface is ready and customers of 21 banks will in a day or two be
able to send and collect money via a smartphone.
A
brainchild of RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan, the UPI, which works on single click
two-factor authentication, will allow a customer to have multiple virtual
addresses for accounts in various banks. The UPI app of 19 banks will be
available on Google Play Store in two-three working days for download. The
details of the service will be available on the websites of the 21 banks. The
new payments interface will also provide an option for scheduling push and pull
transactions, such as sharing bills among peers.
One can
use the UPI app instead of paying cash on receiving a product from an online
shopping website and also for naking miscellaneous payments such as utility
bills, school fees and over-the-counter/barcode-based payments. To ensure
privacy of customer data, NPCI said, in a statement, that there is no account
number mapper anywhere other than the customer’s own bank. This means customers
can freely share their financial address. A customer can also use the mobile
number as the user-name instead of a virtual address like “1234567890@xyz”.
AP Hota,
MD and CEO, NPCI, said: “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.”
After
assessing the pilot run, the RBI had accorded final approval for public launch
of the product. NPCI had decided that only banks with a thousand pilot
customers, 5,000 transactions and success rate of around 80 per cent would be
permitted to go live. Such a threshold criteria helped banks to refine their
systems and procedures.
Banks on the bandwagon
Arun
Tiwari, Chairman and Managing Director, Union Bank of India, said: “...Union
Bank in association with NPCI is one of the first public sector banks to launch
this (UPI) product. This mobile app can be used by both our bank’s customers
and non-customers.”
