 "Nandan Nilekani")
The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) is a crown jewel of India's technology sector, said Nandan Nilekani, non-executive chairman of Infosys during the launch of UPI products at the Global Fintech Fest (GFF) in Mumbai.
He said that the NPCI has exceeded all expectations. "NPCI, which was set up by the RBI in 2008 as a non-profit company for payments, has exceeded all the expectations of the people who have created the UPI. It has set the stage for what we call as national information utilities," Nilekani added.
Nilekani noted that bodies such as the Goods and Services Tax Network (GSTN), DigiYatra, and Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) have been structured on the basis of using NPCI as a template.
He also added that in the next 20 years, India will see a huge formalisation of the economy, where everybody joins the formal system. "We're going from an offline, informal, low-productivity economy to an online, formal, high-productivity economy. As millions of people join the (digital) society, they get a bank account, mobile connections, and use digital capital to get access to credit, and further build businesses," he added.
Nilekani added that the confluence of digital public infrastructure like Aadhaar and UPI, and the infrastructure set up by entrepreneurs in the country, will aid in individuals getting formalised in the society.
The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) demonstrated the latest suite of UPI products at the Global Fintech Fest in Mumbai. This included a credit line on UPI, HelloUPI, Billpay Connect and UPI tap and pay.
With Hello UPI, users will now be able to make real-time payments with the help of voice commands using both smartphones and feature phones. For smartphones, conversational UPI will be live on apps such as BHIM, PayZapp, among others.
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The AI system works on acoustics which is capable of identifying the difference between silence and sound, understands the language of conversation, the binary intent, a yes or a no to approving or declining a transaction, and can also convert speech to text speech.
"UPI has grown at the fastest pace than any real-time payments system globally. With a monthly transaction volume of over 10 billion transactions in August, with the initiatives launched today, we have the ambition and are confident that it will help us reach our goal of processing 100 billion transactions a month," said Biswamohan Mahapatra, non-executive chairman at NPCI.
Last month, NPCI registered a transaction volume of 10 billion transactions. In terms of value, UPI transactions are poised to reach a new high, having already touched approximately 15.18 trillion. This is within striking distance of the previous high of approximately 15.34 trillion, which was recorded in July.
"Today, UPI is used by 350 million people. We have a three-time opportunity on the user side and a three-time opportunity on the merchant side. We have an opportunity to grow 10 times from here," said Dilip Asbe, managing director and chief executive officer at NPCI on Tuesday.
