What Is The Unified Payments Interface? What Are Its Benefits?

The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), has launched a next-generation online payments solution, called the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), which will increase usage of smartphone and facilitate a deeper penetration of mobile data for financial use.

UPI is a payment system which allows you to transfer money between two organisations, with just a few clicks. Using this interface will help reduce the hassle of typing all the bank details, card details, wallet details etc.

Dr. Raghuram Rajan, Governor, Reserve Bank of India (RBI) launched UPI on April 11, 2016.

Here are main features of UPI:

• The personal mobile phone can be used for making payments including person to person, person to entity, and entity to person.
• Ability to use Aadhaar number, mobile number, card number, and account number in a unified way.
• Further, there will be an option to pay and collect using "virtual payment addresses" that are "aliases" to accounts that may be payee/amount/time limited providing further security features.
• Individuals can make payments only by providing an address with others without having to provide account details or credentials on 3rd party applications or websites.
• Individuals can send collect requests to others person or entity with "pay by" date to allow payment requests to be "snoozed" and paid later before expiry date.
• Individuals can pre-authorize multiple recurring payments similar to ECS with a one-time secure authentication and rule based access.
• UPI application will allow an individual to pay from any account using any number of virtual addresses using credentials such as passwords, PINs, or biometrics (on phone).
• This new application involves less procedure, one can make payments using 1-click 2-factor authentication.

Conclusion

UPI can take banking to a whole new level. As of now 29 banks have agreed to provide UPI services to their customers.

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