UPI123Pay

The usage of UPI, both in terms of the number of transactions (green line) as well as the amount of money being transferred (blue bars), has been increasingly exponentially over the years. In 2021, it hit $840 billion.


 

But UPI was restricted to those who had a smartphone. (That means 40 crore feature phone subscribers were left out). Which is why the RBI launched UPI for feature phones, aka UPI123Pay on 9th March.

 

UPI123Pay doesn’t even require an Internet connection! Here’s how it works: the “123” refers to it being a 3-step process to transfer money via the feature phone – call, choose, and pay. But first, the user has to link his (feature) phone to his bank account. At which point, he’d be asked to set his UPI PIN using his debit card. With that, he is good to use UPI123Pay.

 

To transfer money, (1) he needs to call an IVR number from his feature phone (the IVR works in multiple languages) (2) He then selects whom to transfer the money to – another individual, or to pay a bill etc. (3) If he is transferring to an individual, he enters that person’s mobile number and amount, else just the amount to pay. Then he enters the UPI PIN to confirm the transaction.

 

See how this worked? The IVR service, since it is owned by the RBI/government, takes care of the last step (transferring money via UPI, which would have needed an Internet connection, and thus a smartphone). The articles I read didn’t clearly explain how one pays a merchant (say Amazon or Myntra); but the facility is indeed supported via UPI123Pay (it’s only me who couldn’t find a clear explanation on how it is used). All this is excellent since digital payment systems won’t be restricted to smartphone owners only.

 

As an aside, it is increasingly becoming clear that both India and China are switching into domestically designed digital payment systems (government owned UPI in India; private sector financial payment apps in China - like how PayTM used to work before UPI). So much so that Apple has been forced to acknowledge market realities in both countries – they accept payment via the private sector apps in China; and in India, they accept payment via UPI, Netbanking, and even RuPay card.

 

Having one’s own financial payment systems – both in India and China – means that VISA and MasterCard will never get these countries. That’s 2 billion potential users they won’t get. Who wants plastic when one has a phone? Another benefit of such home-grown solutions is what the Ukraine war shows – American companies can choose to pull the plug whenever they want. Sure, neither Chinese nor Indian payment systems are accepted internationally yet. Then again, how often does one need to be making payments internationally anyway?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Image
Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid
Read more

Animal Senses #7: Touch and Remote Touch

Instinctively, we think touch is based on contact. Not entirely true, explains Ed Yong in Immense World – there’s a more important aspect than contact: “These incredible feats are possible through movement. If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon you’re allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke.” As you run your fingers over a surface, they hit the tiny peaks and troughs and set off vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips.   At the tip of its snout, the star-nosed mole has many pairs of hairless appendages. It uses them to touch things around itself. Alive or dead? Food or ignore? It does these movements at an insane speed. In the time it takes to blink our eyes, the star-nosed mole can probe, identify and swallow its food. “Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s sense of
Read more