SBI to miss deadline for UPI launch

UPI aims to transform the digital money segment; it is set to make money transfers as simple as sending text messages

State Bank of India, the country’s largest lender, is going to miss the deadline for launch of the Unified Payments Interface (UPI).

UPI, launched by National Payments Corporation of India, aims to transform the digital money segment; it is set to make money transfers as simple as sending text messages. The official launch was last month but it is to be available for consumers only from next month.

For this, in the first phase, NPCI had selected 29 banks, which were to be ready by the third or fourth week of June. Five-odd, including SBI, will not be.

“SBI will take lot more time to get ready. In fact, we don’t think they are going to be ready before September, as they haven’t yet placed the order with their vendors,” said a senior official who is a part of the team working on the launch.

This is although SBI has emerged as leader in the mobile banking space, both in volume and value terms. The Reserve Bank of India says SBI had, as of December 2015, accounted for 38.4 per cent of all mobile banking transactions in terms of volume and nearly 36 per cent in value.

For that month, the lender had recorded 15.18 million transactions, for Rs 17,636 crore.

Banks had wanted that mobile wallet players, which till now had an edge over them in the digital cash space, be kept out. As a result, in the first phase, only banks are part of UPI. The others’ applications will be made live only after adequately testing the product and ensuring the working of the application is broadly standard across different lenders, said the official quoted earlier.

Through UPI, consumers can transfer money through a unique virtual address (these are aliases to a bank account, allowing a customer's account to be uniquely mapped), or mobile number or Aadhaar number.

Customers don’t need to know the payee’s IFSC code or bank account details to transfer up to Rs 1 lakh per transaction, making money transfer much simpler.