In an effort to make digital payments easier, the Reserve Bank of India had introduced Unified Payments Interface (UPI), and Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) that lets you send money, check account balance and mini statement, among other things.
Although an ambitious project, but the platform is still in its rudimentary stage and has been defeated by smaller players, because of its lack of common application. So far, 33 banks have signed up on the platform and each has its own application.
To make things easier for users, the govt will be introducing an upgraded easier-to-use application for UPI in a weeks time, that will feature a single app that users can download to transact across multiple banks and lets consumers transact digitally either with or without an Internet connection.
Currently UPI handles only 70,000 transactions a day, and in contrast, Paytm handles around 60-70 lakh transactions a day. The govt wants to change this equation.
National Payments Corporation of India MD AP Hota said, “But we are not very happy. 70,000 is not really a number to be satisfied with. We believe that in the days ahead, further improvement can happen,”
The new version of UPI, will not replace the existing ones and will have basic features such as the ability to send or receive money, linking of accounts, saving profiles of the user, changing the language, recording beneficiary details and providing balance enquiry.
“In due course, when more functionalities are added, we hope that instead of upgrading their individual apps, banks may switch over to the common app,” Hota added.
