Earlier, a slew of innovative products were launched by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) on Wednesday, September 6.
NPCI Launches New UPI Features
These products will catapult the payments giant Unified Payments Interface (UPI) to achieve 100 billion transactions a month.
It basically includes credit lines on UPI, conversational payment mode ‘Hello UPI’, BillPay Connect, UPI Tap & Pay and UPI Lite X.
The news of this product launch comes a week after UPI achieved the milestone of processing 10 billion transactions in a month in August.
Besides this, NPCI also revised its target from 30 billion transactions a month to 100 billion considering these new features.
Exceeding The Expectations
The non-profit organization launched these offerings in the presence of Governor, Reserve Bank of India (RBI), Shaktikanta Das, and Nandan Nilekani, co-founder and non-executive chairman of Infosys at the Global Fintech Fest in Mumbai on September 6.
“NPCI is the crown jewel of India’s technology sector. The structure of NPCI set up by RBI in 2008 as a non-profit company for payments, far exceeded expectations. It has set the stage for national information utilities. Using NPCI as the template we have several bodies now of similar structures whether it is GSTM for taxes, Digi yatra app, ONDC. All these other tech companies we have set up in India on a non-profit basis are to create digital public infrastructure, using NPCI’s model. Hope they too will add value,” said Nilekani.
Becoming An Online Formal High Productivity Economy
Further adding, “In India, we are going from an offline informal low productivity economy to an online formal high productivity economy as millions of people join society, get digital ids, bank accounts, mobile solutions and use digital capital to get credit. In the next 20 years, we will see a huge formalization of India.”
In order to make this a reality, a few things had helped including the digital infrastructures like Aadhaar and UPI and also entrepreneurs, Nilekani said.
During 2016, there were 1,000 startups in India and in 2023, there are 100,000 startups – a 10X growth.
“The success of UPI is reflected in the sheer numbers, as it has scaled up in relatively a short period of time. More than 10 billion transactions for over Rs. 15 trillion value were carried out in August 2023. This number is steadily rising and India’s technology stack has accelerated digitalisation through mobile phones and internet,” Das noted.
Earlier media reported that Prime Minister Narendra Modi also spoke about how amazed foreign delegates are when they see “street vendors asking customers to pay through a QR code through UPI.”
He said, “No wonder India accounted for almost half of the real-time digital transactions that happened in the world! Even other countries are keen on associating with UPI, so much so that Indians find themselves having the option of paying through UPI even outside India.”
