Since official launch of UPI (Unified Payment Interface) in August this year, over 20 major banks in the country have already launched their own UPI based apps or are in process of doing so. The reason for such fast adoption is the ease of payments and P2P money transfers that UPI offers. The payments are instant and can happen at any time of the day or week.
Razorpay, a leading payment gateway company has now announced support for UPI on its platform. With UPI’s integration, Razorpay has become the first payment gateway in India to have UPI enabled on their platform. This will enable customers of over 10,000+ merchants using Razorpay gateway to make online payments via UPI in addition to netbanking, wallets and credit/debit cards.
UPI was created by the National Payment Corporation of India (NPCI) with the support of the Reserve Bank of India and Indian Banks Association (IBA). Financial experts believe UPI will boost the online payments industry and is a major step towards building a ‘cashless society’. With UPI, customers can initiate payment requests through their smartphones and can send and receive money with two-factor authentication (via OTP)
While UPI is currently new and an average customer may not be aware of it or be little hesitant, given the ease of use, it will be a matter of time before its adoption skyrockets. .
On the eve of the launch Harshil Mathur, CEO and Co-Founder of Razorpay said, “In keeping with our robust technology, our systems will automatically update this option for our entire merchant base. Merchants need not worry about integrating extra lines of code to offer UPI. We’ve been in conversations with multiple stakeholders to vet our internal systems and have run successful pilots to ensure a seamless payment experience. Anyone with a mobile phone and a bank account will be able to benefit from UPI for transacting money online. This is a major change for online commerce as UPI will allow merchants reduce transaction costs and create a faster checkout experience”
Two year old Razorpay has grown rapidly currently boasts of merchants like Videocon, Nykaa, Zerodha, NestAway, Udacity and Chai Point among others. Razorpay’s other investors include MasterCard, Tiger Global, and Matrix Partners.
Growth of Cashless payments
According to Capgemini Digital payments have registered a record growth in past few years and it’s growth will only accelerate going forward due to initiatives like UPI and Digital wallets getting popular in developing economies like India. Non-cash transactions in developing countries are expected to grow at a rate of 16.7 percent, whereas in developed countries the growth rate will hover around 6 percent.
According to Ken Research, the Indian payments market is expected to reach INR 8,172.7 billion by 2019!
Cash less payment system is the future of future transection. This is the demand of modern world to go paperless.