 To facilitate about 400 million feature phone users with the digital payment ecosystem in the country, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) on Tuesday launched India’s homegrown payments network unified payments interface (UPI).
Earlier, the UPI payment system so far has been limited to smartphones with internet connections. But now you don’t require a smartphone or internet connection to do UPI payments anymore. India has about 118 crores of mobile phone consumers, of which around 74 crores have smartphones, indicating that there is a noteworthy number of feature phone users in the country.
RBI is finally catering to a vast sector of feature phone users in the country who have been unable to carry out digital transactions just because they do not own a smartphone. The new digital payment mode will provide the access to individuals to make direct digital transactions of payment to others via UPI with feature phones even without an internet connection.
At present, the UPI payment mode is limited to only smartphone users with internet connections. Today India plays a significant role in digital payments and UPI has contributed a lot to India’s digital payments platform, and now UPI must be accessible in an offline mode and on feature phones which have been RBI’s efforts over the past few years.Â
According to Shaktikanta Das, RBI governor, the purpose to launch a UPI-based payment system for feature phones is to enhance digital payment and make them more comprehensive, easy transactions for users, assist larger participation of retail customers in various divisions of the financial markets and improve the capability of service providers.
The basic reason for a UPI-based payment system for feature phones is to fill the gap and take UPI to the next level.The new UPI digital payments system for feature phone users involves four different technologies. First is Interactive Voice Response (IVR) numbers.
Users can dial a number and initiate a secured call from a feature phone, and after getting registered users can start financial transactions without internet connectivity. The second part is through apps on feature phones.
Most UPI functions will be available on apps that are available on feature phones and users can do all types of UPI transactions except scan and pay, which is still a work in progress. The third way of feature phone UPI involves proximity sound-based payments.
This technology makes use of sound waves to permit networking and therefore assists to carry out contactless offline and proximity data communication on any device. The last process is a typical Indian way and that is missed call approach where users receive a callback from a standard number to verify and carry out transactions.Â
UPI has come out as one of the most accepted modes of digital payments in recent years, particularly after demonetization. And now UPI is accessible to that segment of the society which was so far excluded from the digital payments platform.
Edited by Subbuthai Padma
Published by Iram Rizvi
