RBI announces proposal to push UPI payments through feature phones

USSD 2.0, which facilitates UPI for feature phones, accounts for only 0.003 per cent of total UPI volumes and value transactions

On Wednesday, the RBI in its “Statement on Developmental and Regulatory Practices”, announced a proposal to popularise UPI payments on feature phones. Although the central bank is yet to release details of the new service, this would be the third iteration of the feature phone payments push in the country.

In 2012, the National Payments Corporation of India had launched a USSD (Unstructured Supplementary Services Data)-based mobile banking service called *99#. Initially, the facility was only available to MTNL and BSNL users. It was later expanded to all telecom service providers and linked to Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana in 2014. 

The USSD 2.0 was launched alongside BHIM in 2016, incorporating all the UPI options, but it hasn’t quite taken off. 

In 2017-18, USSD 2.0 transactions accounted for 4.3 per cent of total UPI volumes and 1.6 per cent of total transaction value; last year, its share in volume and value transactions had fallen to 0.005 and 0.004 per cent, respectively. 

Until November this year, a total of 0.85 million transactions took place via USSD 2.0, amounting to Rs 12,800 crore. In contrast, 26,850.9 million transactions on the entire UPI platform were worth Rs 49.71 trillion.