Unified Payments Interface(UPI)

21 banks to go live with Unified Payments Interface, says National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI)

National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), the umbrella organisation for all retail payments system in India, on Thursday Aug 25,2016 announced that customers of 21 banks will shortly be able to use Unified Payments Interface (UPI) for sending and collecting money via a smartphone using a Virtual Payment Address (VPA). 

Unified Payments Interface (UPI) will also provide an option for scheduling push and pull transactions for various purposes like sharing bills among peers. 

One can use UPI app instead of paying cash on delivery on receipt of product from online shopping websites and can pay for miscellaneous expenses like paying utility bills, over the counter payments, barcode (scan and pay) based payments, donations, school fees and other such unique and innovative use cases. 

Unified Payments Interface (UPI) will allow a customer to have multiple virtual addresses for multiple accounts in various banks.

In order to ensure privacy of customer’s data, NPCI, in a statement said, there is no account number mapper anywhere other than the customer's own bank. 

This allows the customer to freely share the financial address with others. 

A customer can also decide to use the mobile number as the name instead of the short name for the virtual address like “1234567890@xyz”.