Mumbai - National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) on Thursday said the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) is live and currently available for customers of 21 banks.
Here are the key facts you need to know about the new payments system:
What is UPI?
UPI is an app - a 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. A government press release explains the system as follows: The product will enable money transfers – both ‘Push’ and ‘Pull’ through smart phones. According to it, the two important features of UPI are, (i) it facilitates customer convenience by eliminating the need for providing detailed account/beneficiary details, through the use of virtual address and (ii) it facilitates interoperability of person-to-merchant payments (both push and pull).
The soft launch of UPI was announced by the outgoing Reserve Bank Governor Raghuram Rajan in April this year and was under pilot run, mainly with employee-customers, for some time.
After assessing the success of pilot run, RBI had accorded its final approval for public launch of the product.