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In India, the coalescing of payments around the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI)'s payment network and standard called Unified Payments Interface (

by vivegi 4y ago

In India, the coalescing of payments around the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI)'s payment network and standard called Unified Payments Interface (UPI) has been a gamechanger. Bank consumers can create virtual addresses that they can give to any individual or entity and use it for sending / receiving money. The recipient can be a customer of any bank, not necessarily theirs. As long as the bank is on the NPCI backbone (almost all banks are), the transaction is safe, secure and seamless. At the moment, there are no fees for using UPI and the transaction limit is Rs. 200,000 (approx. USD 2500), so a vast majority of small ticket purchases can be done electronically. The transaction volume statistics at NPCI is pretty impressive. https://www.npci.org.in/what-we-do/upi/product-statistics https://www.npci.org.in/what-we-do/upi/product-statistics

intrasight 4y ago
The Economist recently discussed. To demonstrate the success of UPI, the mentioned that panhanders now routinely present an UPI barcode instead of a pan. I doubt that Apple Cash will have the same success.
- londons_explore 4y ago
  If apple makes it fee-free and paperwork free even for small businesses, and they make an android compatible app, then it will be successful and will take over from banks and MasterCard/visa. Otherwise it'll remain a tiny proportion of the overall payments industry.
- zbarnes 4y ago
  link?
- infofarmer 4y ago
  Beggars in Mainland China have been presenting QR codes (for Alipay and WeChat Pay) for years now. https://www.financialexpress.com/industry/beggars-with-qr-code-chinese-poor-collect-alms-in-mobile-wallets-ditch-tin-bowls/1641567/ https://www.financialexpress.com/industry/beggars-with-qr-co...
FabHK 4y ago
Goes to show that deft government regulation/steering can really achieve something. Similar to SEPA in the EU.
- leokennis 4y ago
  I read about a lot of proprietary apps/services in this chat to allow easy and instantaneous transfers of money between parties. They probably work fine and most importantly filled a gap at the right time. But with SEPA Instant Payments (https://www.ecb.europa.eu/paym/integration/retail/instant_payments/html/index.en.html https://www.ecb.europa.eu/paym/integration/retail/instant_pa...) there is: - A scheme that works based on standards: ISO PACS messages (easy for other banks to join) - Actually transfer the funds from bank A to bank B (not sure if other schemes mentioned here basically work on a "we received an acknowledgement, we promise to send the actual money later via a real payment") in a 10 second period - Does not depend on the commitment of a (small) group of private companies top keep existing, but instead depends on an obligation in EU law enforcing the national banks to force their member banks to implement it The only thing that still sucks is that you send money to others based on their IBAN - which is fine but definitely not as intuitive as an e-mail address or phone number.
  - vivegi 4y ago
    UPI's design is very good. It does all of the mentioned points along with ease of use. 1. You can discover the counterparty using their registered mobile phone number tied with their bank account. In B2B and P2P scenarios, the business or the individual already has the counterparty's phone number in most cases. So, this handles like 90% of the cases of simple discoverability. For use cases like sending money to friends/family, this is perfect. 2. The mapping of the virtual address to the bank account is maintained and managed by the banks (as part of the bank's UPI interface mandated by the standard) and shared with the NPCI's UPI backend using tokenization. 3. A user can create multiple virtual private addresses [VPAs] (eg: mybillpay@bigbank, subscriptions@bigbank etc.,). The user can then track their spends/receipts by VPA. The ease of use is an order of magnitude higher compared to entering bank account information. Settlements are bank-to-bank and instantaneous (~2-3 secs) powered by the NPCI backbone. India used to have a high use of Cash-on-delivery (COD) for e-commerce. This gave a good electronic equivalent for COD that also helped e-com operators.
ptman 4y ago
It's really ridiculous that EU is relying on Mastercard/Visa everywhere. There is EPI (European Payments Initiative, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Payments_Initiative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Payments_Initiative), but it's slow. And not everyone is happy with that, so there's a competing initiative called P27 https://nordicpayments.eu/ https://nordicpayments.eu/
subpixel 4y ago
I'm reminded that in 1994, in Germany, I could give you a number and you could send me money, for free, via the post office.

by vivegi 4y ago

intrasight 4y ago

The Economist recently discussed. To demonstrate the success of UPI, the mentioned that panhanders now routinely present an UPI barcode instead of a pan. I doubt that Apple Cash will have the same success.

londons_explore 4y ago
If apple makes it fee-free and paperwork free even for small businesses, and they make an android compatible app, then it will be successful and will take over from banks and MasterCard/visa. Otherwise it'll remain a tiny proportion of the overall payments industry.
zbarnes 4y ago
link?
infofarmer 4y ago
Beggars in Mainland China have been presenting QR codes (for Alipay and WeChat Pay) for years now. https://www.financialexpress.com/industry/beggars-with-qr-code-chinese-poor-collect-alms-in-mobile-wallets-ditch-tin-bowls/1641567/ https://www.financialexpress.com/industry/beggars-with-qr-co...

FabHK 4y ago

Goes to show that deft government regulation/steering can really achieve something. Similar to SEPA in the EU.

leokennis 4y ago
I read about a lot of proprietary apps/services in this chat to allow easy and instantaneous transfers of money between parties. They probably work fine and most importantly filled a gap at the right time. But with SEPA Instant Payments (https://www.ecb.europa.eu/paym/integration/retail/instant_payments/html/index.en.html https://www.ecb.europa.eu/paym/integration/retail/instant_pa...) there is: - A scheme that works based on standards: ISO PACS messages (easy for other banks to join) - Actually transfer the funds from bank A to bank B (not sure if other schemes mentioned here basically work on a "we received an acknowledgement, we promise to send the actual money later via a real payment") in a 10 second period - Does not depend on the commitment of a (small) group of private companies top keep existing, but instead depends on an obligation in EU law enforcing the national banks to force their member banks to implement it The only thing that still sucks is that you send money to others based on their IBAN - which is fine but definitely not as intuitive as an e-mail address or phone number.
- vivegi 4y ago
  UPI's design is very good. It does all of the mentioned points along with ease of use. 1. You can discover the counterparty using their registered mobile phone number tied with their bank account. In B2B and P2P scenarios, the business or the individual already has the counterparty's phone number in most cases. So, this handles like 90% of the cases of simple discoverability. For use cases like sending money to friends/family, this is perfect. 2. The mapping of the virtual address to the bank account is maintained and managed by the banks (as part of the bank's UPI interface mandated by the standard) and shared with the NPCI's UPI backend using tokenization. 3. A user can create multiple virtual private addresses [VPAs] (eg: mybillpay@bigbank, subscriptions@bigbank etc.,). The user can then track their spends/receipts by VPA. The ease of use is an order of magnitude higher compared to entering bank account information. Settlements are bank-to-bank and instantaneous (~2-3 secs) powered by the NPCI backbone. India used to have a high use of Cash-on-delivery (COD) for e-commerce. This gave a good electronic equivalent for COD that also helped e-com operators.

ptman 4y ago

It's really ridiculous that EU is relying on Mastercard/Visa everywhere. There is EPI (European Payments Initiative, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Payments_Initiative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Payments_Initiative), but it's slow. And not everyone is happy with that, so there's a competing initiative called P27 https://nordicpayments.eu/ https://nordicpayments.eu/

subpixel 4y ago

I'm reminded that in 1994, in Germany, I could give you a number and you could send me money, for free, via the post office.