NPCI asks banks to enable customer onboarding onto UPI through Aadhar, OTP

The need for authentication through Aadhar with OTP arose because the number of UPI users was getting restricted to the customers who had debit cards.

To further deepen the adoption of digital payments in the country, National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), the umbrella body for retail digital payments, has asked banks to enable onboarding of customers onto UPI by authentication through their Aadhar cards with a one-time password (OTP).

Under the existing mechanism, customers who have debit cards can get onboarded onto UPI by simply keying in their phone numbers and the last six digits of their debit cards. A debit card is mandatory to set the UPI PIN under the current system, thus restricting access to the payments platform only to users who