Open source helped transform our tech landscape: NPCI App development head

Says it brought flexibility while reducing downtime, costs and dependence on third-party vendors

The open source platform helped transform the technology landscape of the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) by bringing flexibility while reducing downtime, costs and dependence on third-party vendors, a company executive said on Monday.

NPCI, the umbrella organisation for all retail payment systems, has built products such as Unified Payments Interface (UPI), RuPay, IMPS, and FASTag.

Although it started by outsourcing its business operations to third-party vendors, the not-for-profit company has been shifting to open source technologies for the past six years. Open source software is a code designed to be publicly accessible—anyone can see, modify, and distribute the code according to the needs.

Sampathkumar Rangasamy, Chief of Online products and New Applications Development at (NPCI), said this has benefited the company in many ways. “Previously we dealt with commercial off-the-shelf transaction processing platforms for online and back office operations. It had several limitations, so we took a conscious call to move out of this legacy framework to open source around 6-7 years ago.”

Increasing ease of maintenance, availability, and scalability and cutting down the dependency on proprietary OEMs, were the key drivers of the shift towards open source platforms, Rangasamy said.

He said, “Business applications from proprietary OEMs might not be able to offer the required flexibility. We wanted to reduce dependency on any vendor, be it hardware or software vendors. At least for 60-70 per cent of business applications by NPCI we have multiple options when it comes to delivering the agility to the business.”

Another major reason to adopt open source technology was to cut down on different costs. The older model involved more spending due to the costs of bigger servers as well as license costs for the commercial database.

“One of the aims of NPCI is to reduce the cost per transaction to the entire ecosystem, from member banks to the consumers. It was only possible after we came out of the legacy system,” the executive said.

He added that the platform has also improved the availability of the products drastically taking it to 99.999%. “This is because of the horizontal scaling and running the system on multiple servers, so even if one server goes down, it is not going to affect the service.”

NPCI plans to continue exploring the opportunities brought by open source platforms.

Rangasamy said the company would like to join other tech-savvy organisations for this.

“Currently we are the users of this ecosystem, but we also plan to contribute by building tools, frameworks, and business applications for open source. Though it is in the initial stage, you are going to hear that some or other business application from NPCI is being made open source for the entire ecosystem to consume."