44 ms·

UPI Payments: 10B transactions a month done, next stop 100B

248 points by TriNetra 3y ago

sidcool 3y ago
The scale of UPI payments is unprecedented. Perhaps the best payment system in the world by far. My friends who come from US are always awe struck by the pervasiveness and easy of use of UPI payments. They want it so bad in the West!
- yftsui 3y ago
  Probably not everyone, I hate QR coded based payment systems but prefer Apple Pay, so the apps won’t have my camera access. Same applies when folks from China claiming Alipay or WeChat is the best payment system.
  - lazyninja987 3y ago
    usually people initiate transfer using 10 digit phone number. i really dont like QR codes too because most of the time either the QR code is not oriented for easy scanning or worn out and no longer scannable.
    - ramraj07 3y ago
      I pay by upi multiple times a day and haven’t had a single instance of a bad QR code.
  - gmerc 3y ago
    It’s not just QR. Plenty of other modes of payment supported including Whatsapp and Google. The government aggressively manages the system to prevent any single company from getting too much weight and forces them to address scams or other system occurs in almost real time by the threat of being thrown off the rails.
    - wtmt 3y ago
      > The government aggressively manages the system to prevent any single company from getting too much weight and forces them to address scams or other system occurs in almost real time by the threat of being thrown off the rails. It’s actually shocking that only a few years ago RBI was concerned about concentration risk of having NPCI (the platform operator of UPI) and invited proposals from banks and companies for NUE (New Umbrella Entity) licenses. Then something changed and it canceled all those proposals. NPCI has a monopoly on instant fund transfers (leaving aside the RBI run RTGS). NPCI wants to limit concentration risk among its clients by trying to push for lower market share among competitors within its platform, like Google Pay or WhatsApp Pay. As for scams, there are plenty of them on UPI every single day, and there’s no way to get any fraudulently transferred funds back without filing a police complaint and waiting for them to do their jobs (and greasing their palms depending on the amount for the job to be done).
  - notsahil 3y ago
    UPI isn't QR based it you can also use UPI ID, which is like email. For eg: example@provider And most UPI are linked with phone number, so you can also pay via phone number if UPI is linked with it.
    - kmlx 3y ago
      phone numbers aren’t secure at all thou.
      - chupchap 3y ago
        How so?
        kmlx 3y ago
        https://eu.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/07/27/cell-phone-number-more-important-less-secure-twitter-password-column/820232002/ https://eu.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/07/27/cell-phone-... it's literally one of the least secure things you can have.
        chupchap 3y ago
        UPI doesn't just work based on phone number. Phone number is just the username equivalent in this context. You still need to put in a pin.
  - perryizgr8 3y ago
    The problem with apple pay is that it is inaccessible to 80% of the population.
    - ztrww 3y ago
      Apple Pay (unless you use it to pay online) is just wallet app for debit/credit cards, Android has the same thing. I guess in Europe there is just much less demand for systems like this because NFC terminals are you ubiquitous.
  - sateesh 3y ago
    Just curious, why you hate QR code system ?
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  US FedNow instant payments are live, just going to take some time to ramp volume.
- egghese 3y ago
  UPI is an impressive system, I use it often and it is quite empowering for billions of Indians. But calling it the "best payment system in the world"! And west wants it so bad sounds like blind exaggerations. United States is not the only western country. Scandinavian countries has Swish (2012), Vipps (2013), and Mobile pay (2015), Canada has Interac.
  - ramraj07 3y ago
    Others have the system but is it as good and seamless as the Indian one?
    - RandomLensman 3y ago
      Depends on what you mean. Instant transfers up to €100k work in Europe's SEPA (and you can indeed use a QR to encode the transfer information with most bank apps, I think). And there is of course the usual contact-less payment stuff at merchants.
      - isbvhodnvemrwvn 3y ago
        That's still not as easy as app payments. There are a number of systems like BLIK in Poland where you have a lower max payment amount, but you just give somebody a temporary 6 digit number and approve the amount they withdraw, that's it. For trusted payment channels you just approve. If you initiate the payment, just give phone number of recipient.
        RandomLensman 3y ago
        Agreed, but I think for places with a mature payments and debit infrastructure there isn't that much additional business and I suspect most banks' apps will just incorporate that like they do with NFC payments. Most growth in payments is either new markets or markets that grow a lot, but not completion of rather mature markets (and additional services).
        3y ago
- whizzter 3y ago
  Don't confuse the check wielding Americans for the "west", for example Sweden/Norway/Finland has similar systems named Swish/Vipps/MobilePay (Phone number based with scannable QR codes,etc) that's taken over between people and smaller merchants (even young people organizing raves use Swish payments on-site despite it being potentially traceable) and the banks/companies involved in those services are now in the process of building cross-national support that probably will let other countries join soon. I think the main takeaway is that phones and capable app ecosystems was a "hidden" disruption enabler vis-a-vis the traditional credit card processing companies that various actors in various countries has taken advantage of now, the big question is if/when they will make this internationally interoperable (considering the trouble foreigners in Sweden has with being excluded from these "easy" payments that at best requires a card or at worst cash it's an area that needs fixing).
  - chillbill 3y ago
    Oh swish is traceable and actively monitored. A few college friends of mine were organizing a party and they all chipped in a 100 kr to one guy (about 25 individuals) who got a call the next day from his bank for suspicious activity.
    - whizzter 3y ago
      Interesting to hear, I've heard of Swish has been a bit on edge trying to upsell people on merchant accounts and I wouldn't be surprised if some of these reports go to the tax office. Still for those involved they wouldn't probably care too much as long as there isn't real-time reporting to the police to get events shut down (although with laxer laws in that area that'll probably fade as an concern).
  - sureglymop 3y ago
    There is a similar thing in Switzerland called "Twint".
  - dotnet00 3y ago
    "Check wielding Americans"? Haven't needed my checkbook in many years now, almost everywhere has tap-to-pay and the rare place which doesn't has a chip reader.
- n_ary 3y ago
  Not sure about US, here in Germany, I really love the tap-pay(NFC based) usually everywhere(except some random kebab shops). It simply works regardless of me having an Android/iPhone or simply just a the nfc enabled card. I don’t need to open another account, fumble with one-more-app or anything. Also apple-pay appears to mask my CC/DC number as well, so better safety. I want it everywhere badly in west as well as east and middle(-east). I am familiar with UPI and few similar things in other neighbouring countries(looks like every SEA country has its own entirely different version of it and some country has almost 4-6 competing copy-cats!).
  - user_7832 3y ago
    I’m sure your nfc card/phone works great in Germany but it’s worth noting that part of the reason is that your card is likely Mastercard/visa. Here in the Netherlands tap and pay is also seamless with maestro cards… but the moment you try to use it internationally, POS machines reject it (“out of network” or something). If you have a diner’s card or an American Express card you might notice how many terminals/pos’es reject those as well.
    - kmlx 3y ago
      netherlands has always been an outlier when it comes to card payments.
      - user_7832 3y ago
        With regards to maestro, yes sure, but I think diner’s etc (aka anything non visa/Mastercard) have issues internationally.
        kmlx 3y ago
        diner’s maybe. but i never had a problem with my mastercard or visa. even my amex is widely supported.
        3y ago
- kmlx 3y ago
  > They want it so bad in the West! i don’t think so. in the UK NFC payments via the phone’s wallet are ubiquitous.
- Indian_in_US 3y ago
  I‘m Indian living in US. I would rather prefer NFC solution like credit card attached to Apple Pay over UPI. Once you use NFC with Apple Pay you are not going back to UPI. Plus credit card comes with fraud protection and credit card points that I can use for more travel.
db1234 3y ago
The most incredible thing about UPI is how it was embraced by even the poorest in the remote corners of India. One of the former finance ministers of India talked in a dismissive tone in the parliament about rural India adopting digital payments when the current government announced "Digital India" plan. Some one made a meme video out of it mocking him. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCnv8gwN0ug https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCnv8gwN0ug Another video showing the ingenuity of a road side vendor https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uY2156ecRDQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uY2156ecRDQ
- gmerc 3y ago
  Jiophone helped a lot
  - mavelikara 3y ago
    Pulling currency from circulation overnight also did.
    - hiyer 3y ago
      Not so much, actually. What really led to the rapid uptake of UPI was Covid and people's reluctance to handle cash as a result of it.
      - unmole 3y ago
        > What really led to the rapid uptake of UPI was Covid and people's reluctance to handle cash as a result of it. That timeline doesn't make sense. UPI was already a spectacular success by 2019.
        sateesh 3y ago
        In 2019 it was gaining traction, as the article shows the volume of transactions were around 1 billion per month in March 2019.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
bayesianbot 3y ago
Thailand has a similar system - you use your banking app to scan a QR code, either the code is generated and has the amount included or it's printed static paper and you write the amount yourself, then show the receipt to the merchant or they check the notification in their phone. Started in 2017, nowadays it's everywhere, I can go to local market and pay $0.5 products with it. My 12 year old daughter opened her own account as well and didn't need my help, only installed an app and went to ATM that has a special slot for ID card to verify identity. Quite convenient as no need to carry cash anymore.
- bheadmaster 3y ago
  Quite convenient for tracking people's consumption choices and discriminating based on them. Hi there! We've noticed an increase of fast food purchases in the log of your account. Therefore your medical insurance premiums have risen by 200% to accomodate the change. For lessened prices, you might want to start consuming our Healthy Food(TM) lunch packs by EvilCorp, made out of bugs for the good of the environment :)
  - LiamPowell 3y ago
    Why could this not also be done with currently used card systems?
    - piuantiderp 3y ago
      Mostly because the systems are old, limited in the amount of data they generate.
      - alexchamberlain 3y ago
        They are definitely generating and analysing this data in the US. I believe the data protection laws in the UK and EU prevent it here, at least to the scale. There is no doubt it could be done though - it's the same basic technology with a different transport mechanism and/or intermediary.
    - 3y ago
jimsimmons 3y ago
The day after demonetisation was announced every news paper in India carried a front page ad with the PM batting for Chinese backed PayTM. The UPI revolution happened despite Modi, not because of him in the slightest.
- gmerc 3y ago
  That’s … not correct. Modi’s demonetization was a huge forced driver of digital payment adoption. It’s what spurred most companies into kicking off their UPI efforts
  - jimsimmons 3y ago
    Why was the PM advertising for a 3rd party wallet? The goal of demonetisation has never been clear. It was a thuglaq move and Indian right wing has retro fitted motivations to it.
    - unmole 3y ago
      > Why was the PM advertising for a 3rd party wallet? He wasn't. This was PayTM making hay when the sun shone. And obviously glorifying the Dear Leader has its benefits.
      - jimsimmons 3y ago
        So I can use his pic to promote any private business I want? That brazenly and without permission?
        unmole 3y ago
        Why would the Dear Leader object to more photographs of him in circulation?
  - instagraham 3y ago
    Shooting several people in a bid to get them to hospital to have their corneas scanned for cataracts can also lead to lower cataract rates. That doesn't make it the best way to get people to scan for cataracts.
ETH_start 3y ago
Many countries have a single dominant privately owned e-cash system. The only alternative to a future with centralized financial systems, where the individual's right to transact won't be at the total mercy of the whims of forces they don't control (e.g. a corporation which deems their credit risk as unacceptably high, a political zeitgeist that deems their unwillingness to get vaccinated as making them deserving financial isolation, an authoritarian regime deeming their political outspokenness as too great a threat to their power, etc) is the ascendance of a permissionless decentralized financial system using a ledger with distributed consensus, like the public blockchain.
- pgeorgi 3y ago
  > like the public blockchain Since this thread is about an article celebrating UPI's 10B transactions/month: That means between 4133 (28 days/month) and 3733 (31 days/month) transactions per second on average. Bitcoin is at 7 transactions per second. The bitcoin blockchain takes ~500GB these days. At UPI's transaction volume, it'd take 250TB by now, replicated at various sites. Whatever you think of blockchain, it has some serious work ahead.
  - ETH_start 3y ago
    That's an excellent point, as scalability has been the critical handicap of public blockchains to date. This article is nearly two years old, but provides a good overview of the latest techniques devised for achieving scalability in public blockchains: https://polynya.medium.com/rollups-data-availability-layers-modular-blockchains-introductory-meta-post-5a1e7a60119d https://polynya.medium.com/rollups-data-availability-layers-... Since then, layer 2s (which are the principal execution layer of the modular blockchain stack the article above expounds upon) have seen exponential growth in adoption, and mounting innovations bringing them progressively closer to their theoretical potential of 100,000 transactions per second: https://l2beat.com/scaling/activity https://l2beat.com/scaling/activity
    - chx 3y ago
      > scalability has been the critical handicap of public blockchains to date. Also, the blatant scam nature of them is a bit of a problem. While there's a lot of hype, the Washington Post already printed the truth in 2015 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/06/08/bitcoin-isnt-the-future-of-money-its-either-a-ponzi-scheme-or-a-pyramid-scheme/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/06/08/bitco... which an economy professor have nicely expanded on in two blog posts https://ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2020-12-31-bitcoin-ponzi.html https://ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2020-12-31-bitcoin-pon... https://www.ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2021-01-16-yes-ponzi.html https://www.ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2021-01-16-yes-pon...
mehulagrawal 3y ago
That's >50% of monthly global Visa transactions [1]. Monthly volume at ~$190 billion [2], as compared to ~$1 trillion monthly volume for Visa globally [3]. Pretty good, given that most banks have daily UPI limits of $1200, and much lower individual transaction limits. [1] https://www.thenationalnews.com/business/technology/2023/07/25/visa-profit-surges-on-higher-cross-border-transactions/ https://www.thenationalnews.com/business/technology/2023/07/... [2] https://www.cnbctv18.com/technology/upi-monthly-transaction-volumes-value-august-historic-10-billion-mark-cross-payments-17683881.htm https://www.cnbctv18.com/technology/upi-monthly-transaction-... [3] https://annualreport.visa.com/financials/default.aspx https://annualreport.visa.com/financials/default.aspx
- kumarvvr 3y ago
  It's 1200 USD per day.
  - mehulagrawal 3y ago
    "daily UPI limits of $1200"
albert_e 3y ago
All positives are accepted. Concerns -- - Cronies of government have captured the technology stack making themselves key players that can control and monetize this space. - Traceability of all petty transactions -- enabling building of super rich profile of individuals / orgs -- ripe with potential for misuse. - Leaving a trail of your PII like name / UPI ID (which in some cases is your mobilenumber@upiprovider) / last few digits of bank account number etc with all random people you transact with -- like taking a rikshaw ride or buying potatoes in a street-side vegetable market. (99.9% of these are harmless -- but the small fraction can invite intrusion / enable harassment) - Over enthusiastic adoption of digital payments to the exclusion of other options forcing people to use apps. And the newer payment mechanisms -- opening newer avenues for scamming the less savvy / elderly / vulnerable. - Pushing this change to people rather than letting the benefits and convenience naturally lead to adoption -- after the flaws are slowly uncovered and fixed through early adoption by savvy people (see Demonetization of 2016) - This blind worship of technology as a silver bullet that cannot be criticized (or you are labelled a foreign-sponsored detractor / anti-national / india-hater whatever) extends more broadly into adjacent areas like the Aadhaar national ID system, linking of it to all spheres of citizen services from birth to death including voting rights and banking.
- DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
  > Traceability of all petty transactions -- enabling building of super rich profile of individuals / orgs -- ripe with potential for misuse. How is that any different to what Visa and Mastercard can do? Speaking for myself, *every* purchase I make now, no matter how petty, is made with credit or debit-cards which go through their payment networks. The only exceptions are my house' landscaping (still uses paper cheques), buying weed (all my local dispensaries in WA are cash-only due to the federal bank embargo on the legal cannabis industry), or personal transfers over Zelle/PayPal/Venmo - so I'm sure Mr. Mastercard has compiled quite the dossier on me by now.
  - sateesh 3y ago
    Not op, prior to UPI all these transactions were done using cash, credit card penentration in India was quite low.
ChrisArchitect 3y ago
For the uninformed, is this like the Interac system in Canada?
- yaymanish 3y ago
  Nah, For a system similar to Interac they have NEFT, RTGS and IMPS which are bank acc to bank acc transfer. UPI requires bank account but you need UPI id to transfer the fund.
  - wtmt 3y ago
    > UPI requires bank account but you need UPI id to transfer the fund. UPI requires a bank account, a mobile phone number linked to the bank account and a smartphone to transfer funds for anything other than a trivially small payment (tiny payments are now supported on feature phones).
- nafey 3y ago
  Interac is not real time. UPI is completely real time and money gets debited from your account and deposited to the merchants account instantly.
- _xnmw 3y ago
  Not nearly as convenient. Do you use Interac to pay for a $1.50 coffee regularly straight from your phone? Send money to a friend without needing to exchange emails/phone/passwords? Be completely fee-less no matter what bank you use? Not require "acceptance" on the other end? Be notified and require approval before a merchant can debit your account? From what I understand, UPI has all of these things and Interac does not.
  - eldaisfish 3y ago
    UPI is not free and people should really stop parroting that talking point. It is free, FOR NOW. There are plans in place to charge a 1.1% fee for transactions to merchants. The indian government claims that there will be savings via banks handling less cash but it provided exactly zero in the way of calculations, estimates or data. In 2022, the indian digital payment industry expected a net loss of around 60 million USD.
dang 3y ago
Related. Others? A digital payments revolution in India - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36011978 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36011978 - May 2023 (165 comments) Tiny, cheap smart speakers unlocked the rise of digital payments in India - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35440608 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35440608 - April 2023 (142 comments) Why peer to peer digital payment system UPI should remain free in India - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32821955 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32821955 - Sept 2022 (41 comments) India leaps ahead on payments - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31970992 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31970992 - July 2022 (4 comments) UPI: India's Unified Payments Interface - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24094323 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24094323 - Aug 2020 (178 comments)
spraveenitpro 3y ago
[dead]
omeysalvi 3y ago
UPI payments used to be a little hit or miss a few years ago but they have been almost flawless for me over the last year. Apps have matured and show a warning if the recipient or self network is down rather than initiating a transaction that might never complete. The only roadblock now is to figure out a way to handle large volume days such as new years when the network is overwhelmed at night.
colesantiago 3y ago
UPI is one of the best payment systems invented and in under 10 years has more transactions, use cases and ease of use than cryptocurrencies which is clearly terrible for payments. This shows that UPI has the potential to scale beyond India yet crypto cannot scale at all.
- JyB 3y ago
  They are fundamentally different.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - colesantiago 3y ago
    So explain how?
    - postcynical 3y ago
      There is no 1200$ limit on crypto transactions.
- jongjong 3y ago
  As we see more of these payment systems emerge, crypto will become more important. The thing about large centralized systems it that sooner or later, they will end up with more virtual units than they can back with real currency and there will be a run on these platforms. History may not repeat itself, but it rhymes. Centralized systems are inherently unreliable and impossible to reliably audit as they can self-report anything. Whatever that single database system reports is treated as true, end of story. Nobody else can verify or contest. The fiat monetary system is itself just made up of a large number of centralized banking systems which have probably issued more units than they claim/believe. But the critical difference from private payment systems is that because the banking systems are treated as the sources of truth to represent the national currency, they can never run out of units. The way this problem will manifest itself is probably through inflation as the banks will have all these new currency units being created out of thin air due to thousands of different system flaws or exploits across thousands of different systems... These counterfeited digital units will be accepted as payment just like legitimate digital units; there will be no way to tell the difference as all the banks inherently trust each other (see correspondent banking). Essentially, fraudsters will control much of the new money minted by various centralized systems which will give them a lot of power in the markets. The reason why crypto is important is that it's publicly auditable and cannot be counterfeited (neither accidentally nor intentionally). I believe that eventually, most economic participants will not be able to get a hold of the national fiat currency no matter how hard they work or how valuable their work is but some other people will have no difficulty getting hold of that fiat currency and they won't work at all (they won't need to). This contrast is going to be the catalyst that causes people to move to crypto as it will cause hyperinflation due to large fiat holders being unproductive members of society and crypto holders being comparatively productive.
ufodktztd 3y ago
better title is, they have 10B of citizen relationship data. the same data you get off you sum up visa and Facebook and Google and Verizon. nobody gets the scale of this data. visa and mc see the writing on the wall. that's why they raise rates earlier this week. it's their last breath on the markets they still hold.
me551ah 3y ago
The major difference between UPI payments and Credit Cards is that there is no 'surcharge'. This is what makes it very viable for small merchants to accept payments of minimal amounts.
- wtmt 3y ago
  This is why banks have never been happy with UPI because their costs to support aren’t fully recovered and it’s a drain. They’ve supported it mainly because of the government pushing them to. MDR (the charges the merchants pay) started coming to UPI too, a few months ago. The “free” party won’t last a lot longer.
  - vinay_ys 3y ago
    UPI payments to merchants have had MDR for a while now. And there is a government fund to compensate banks as well. Cost on its own isn't the real reason for banks to be unhappy. Banks were unhappy because they were not used to this kind of pace of feature growth and user growth. It put operational stress on their teams and their relatively old systems (much newer than western banks). They also saw it as a zero-sum game where UPI had opportunity cost w.r.t growth/profit in credit cards. But the reality is somewhat different. Affluent class still uses credit cards (for loyalty points, irony!) and cards market has grown quite well too. And as digital usage expands and banks have embraced digital, they see UPI as an engagement driver and they make money on selling other financial products including credit cards and loans. Anyone who isn't thinking this way will be killed by competition soon enough.
- perfopt 3y ago
  This is exactly why banks are unhappy - they have to bear the infra cost. This is also the reason the government is trying to push UPI wallet. I suspect at some future point UPI (non-wallet) transactions will be charged a small fee and wallet transactions will not.
  - blackoil 3y ago
    Banks are in general happy as any cost is offset by reduction in cash handling cot. ATMs installation and maintenance are costly, branches even more so, you can reduce that. Also, for the merchants, cash handling cost is greater than 0. > I suspect at some future point UPI (non-wallet) transactions will be charged a small fee and wallet transactions will not. Right now, it is other way round. Wallet transactions above ₹2000 attract some fees for merchants.
laurels-marts 3y ago
I this something like iDeal in Netherlands for online payments or Apple Pay for physical payments? How does it compare to both?
- SpacePortKnight 3y ago
  It's both. You can transfer/receive money to/from anyone with either a QR code, a UPI address like `batman@upi` or a mobile number. You can also setup mandates (autopay) for recurring subscriptions like Netfix. Unlike Credit Cards, you can even bypass the merchant and directly cancel an autopay through a UPI payment app.
sirius87 3y ago
The next leg of growth for UPI is already underway with the inclusion of RuPay credit cards under UPI. Until last year, UPI transactions would directly hit your bank account balance and flood your bank statement with many small purchase entries. Linking a RuPay [1] credit card to a UPI app provider such as Google Pay in India allows users to pay through their credit card [2]. This will in turn boost transaction volume on India's indigenous RuPay payment network, and it will probably show its impact on Visa and Mastercard. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RuPay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RuPay [2] https://www.livemint.com/news/india/google-pay-brings-rupay-credit-card-based-upi-payments-how-to-use-11684841757796.html https://www.livemint.com/news/india/google-pay-brings-rupay-...
davelondon 3y ago
I was in India earlier this year, and found there was no way (and I spent hours trying) for a foreigner to get access to the UPI system. This meant: 1) There were some cashless fast food outlets that I couldn't eat at 2) There was no way for me to book an intercity bus ticket I eventually managed to get a bus ticket by sweet-talking someone in a shop to use their personal UPI account in exchange for cash. I fear there's going to be more problems like this for travellers as communities go cashless around the world.
- itsbits 3y ago
  Now Indian airports have outlets to create UPIs for foreigners visiting the country
  - dilliwal 3y ago
    any source?
  - Mandatum 3y ago
    Can’t wait to hand over my passport and drivers license to some random person after security wearing a uniform and holding an iPad after I get off an 8 hour red-eye. Surely nothing can go wrong.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - sofixa 3y ago
      It's the same as the kiosks to get a local SIM card which also often require ID. Also optional. > drivers license A driver's license is rarely accepted as a valid ID document outside of the US which rarely has anything better.
      - 3y ago
SpacePortKnight 3y ago
India's largest denomination banknote is now just Rs. 500 or $6 after their recent ban on the Rs. 2000 notes. Thus, online payment becomes the only way to transfer any meaningful amount.
shivz45 3y ago
https://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Kochi/traders-wary-of-accepting-upi-based-payments-after-freezing-of-accounts/article66728754.ece https://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Kochi/traders-wary-of-a...
tacocataco 3y ago
I really really don't care what cash transfer app we go with, I just want to only have one app and for it to NEVER change. Ideally, there would be regulated advisarial integration between the apps. That way if you had venmo and they had cashapp, it would still work! Let these companies compete on UX and financial instruments, not creating a walled garden of users and hoping they get the most inertia. We made it work with phone networks, I think we could handle this.
- wtmt 3y ago
  For UPI, which is created and run by NPCI (an organization comprising a consortium of private and public banks), there is an “official” app called BHIM (Bharat Interface for Money). Anyone who has it doesn’t have to worry if the other person is using Google Pay or WhatsApp Pay or another app. Banks also have their own UPI apps or include the UPI feature in their banking app. All these apps work on the same platform, which is UPI, which in turn is supported by all banks.
- legends2k 3y ago
  I've not used any third party UPIs. I've been using BHIM UPI since 2020 _almost_ without issues.
- xrisk 3y ago
  Well that’s the point, UPI is literally interoperable and you can use any app you want and it just works. It’s not Indian’s fault that there is no such standard worldwide.
  - kmlx 3y ago
    there is already a standard. it's SEPA/SWIFT and works on IBANs independent of any banks. but it's use case is tiny in most of the world. most payments aren't made to people you want to give money to. most payments actually go to sellers. as such what people use in developed countries is their credit card.
    - vaccarium 3y ago
Brajeshwar 3y ago
I’ve been using UPI since its very early days when it used to fail quite often. UPI is still one of the best things to happen in the financial scene in India. However, these days, personally, I’m trying to reduce it to either known people, or established institutions. I wish there is another layer of tokenization when one pays via UPI, like how Apple Pay does. I wish that the transaction is obfuscated and the phone numbers and/or UPI ID are hidden. You pay for a nice hot cup of ₹10 Chai on the streets but then you got a phone call later on - naively to upsell something, or the next step up, trying to scam you. Unlike me, my wife continues to pick up every incoming phone calls. We have had enough calls from people whom she paid via UPI trying to sell or this/that and what not. There is a scam going on in India. Random females, who are either naked or scantily clothed, will call up on WhatsApp Video. If you pick up the call, say while in the bathroom and not fully clothed, they will take screenshots and threaten you that they will make that picture “viral” to extort money. I won't be surprised if there is an under-belly of phone numbers and other data being sold that were collected via UPI payment transactions. Cash is still OK at the tea-stalls, the random shop, etc. Well, when I just wanted to have a simple Bombay’s cutting-chai but the chai-guy wants my phone number, and everything else -- I'm not comfortable with that.
- crop_rotation 3y ago
  Using ICICI bank iMobile you can create a random UPI id totally unrelated to your phone number I agree with the problems you mention, and in general there is an increasing trend of taking phone numbers of customers in India, e.g. once at a Nike store, I was told the purchase couldn't be complete without the phone number.
  - vinay_ys 3y ago
    I refuse to give phone numbers and usually the cashier will enter their own fake phone number to let the system proceed further. Some shops like decathlon tried to force us to install their app, create an account and then scan and pay through that – at the cashier counter. I just left the entire shopping cart there and walked out without purchasing. Such crazy things do happen but those companies will learn the lesson quickly as Indians are quite savvy about these things.
igetspam 3y ago
That's a lot of messages moving around. Kafka?
SolomonLijo 3y ago
I think UPI is one of the best decisions in the financial sector of India and w/ better infrastructure, it can do a lot more!
- SolomonLijo 3y ago
  Better infrastructure, in some parts of the country are needed, a lot (1)! There's also a lot of merchants of some parts of India that do not accept UPI-Payments (2) and so if these were fixed - we will have an in-destructible financial service, at the hands of each and every person. 1 - In many cases for my Dad, it had failed due to poor internet in the area. 2 - I heard from an article that a lot of merchants in Mumbai do not accept them.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
avl999 3y ago
I was recently in India a few weeks ago for a friend's wedding. I am not an Indian national/citizen/whatever and my experience related to anything tech and money was absolute awful (esp the obsession with OTPs) * The problems start as soon as you land at the airport. I land at the Delhi airport, my friend has sent a driver to pick me up and gave me his contact info. I try to connect to Airport wifi and bam it's asking me for an Indian number to text an OTP to connect to the public WiFi. Why is having an indian number at the Delhi INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT an expectation? What do they expect foreign travelers to do? Ridiculous. Luckily I found someone and asked to use their phone to whatsapp the driver and figure out where he was. * Foreign credit cards are hit and miss. I have 2 credit cards, I let my bank know I would be traveling and I still could not reliably use them, they worked maybe a fraction of the time. Apparently Indian government added some "security" requirements earlier this year to "prevent fraud" that ices out a large number of foreign cards at many payment tills. This essentially makes India a cash-only economy for foreign tourists. * If you try to use your foreign cards while shopping, many places will ask to send an OTP to your (indian) number even for relatively small amount of money involved, and again as a foreigner you are out of luck. * Since I can't use my cards reliably, I am now forced to carry around cash. Worse... the highest denomination available is 500 rupeees, which is equivalent to about $6. This means that if you are planning on doing any type of shopping as a foreigner you have to carry a fat wad of cash on your person the entire time. I intended to do some shopping, eating out and drinking which meant I had to carry around 20,000 ruppees at all times, which was neither comfortably due to how fat that wad of cash is, not relaxing as I am constantly worried about losing it. * I finally decided to get an Indian phone number to get around all the OTP nonsense and get some data while walking around. And bam to get an Indian sim card you need an indian ID or as a foreigner go through an application process involving a bunch of documentation (and not trivial documentation, requirements like a picture that matches the exact dimensions accepted by them) and it's not a quick process. Red tape upon red tape to get a sim card for normal usage! Thankfully, someone helped me out with a SIM card they purchased via their govt ID and gave it to me saving me the pain. * The pain doesn't end here. After I get my sim card, I realize I need to buy a bit more data. Easy enough I think in my head... there's even an app from the provider! I pick the upgraded plan and try to buy via my credit card and boom, international credit cards are not accepted for e-transactions. I literally just want to give them the equivalent of $10 to get an additional 25 gigs of data and I can't do it online. Again, I asked someone to buy it for me and paid them in cash. * Then I wanted to buy a friend a gift that is only available on Amazon. The red tape strikes, apparently as of this year Amazon India can no longer accept foreign credit cards as methods of payment due to "security and anti-fraud requirements" by the indian govt. Again, I have to find someone to buy it for me from Amazon using their card and pay them cash for it. The bad is that everything is so needlessly complicated and red-tapey for foreigners. Things that should be trivial are hard. The good is that you can always find someone to help you circumvent the red-tape by paying them cash :).
porkbeer 3y ago
When you ban cash to control your populace, of coure an alternative becomes essential. Hardly worth celebrating our peicemeal subjugation.

248 points by TriNetra 3y ago

The scale of UPI payments is unprecedented. Perhaps the best payment system in the world by far. My friends who come from US are always awe struck by the pervasiveness and easy of use of UPI payments. They want it so bad in the West!

yftsui 3y ago
Probably not everyone, I hate QR coded based payment systems but prefer Apple Pay, so the apps won’t have my camera access. Same applies when folks from China claiming Alipay or WeChat is the best payment system.
- lazyninja987 3y ago
  usually people initiate transfer using 10 digit phone number. i really dont like QR codes too because most of the time either the QR code is not oriented for easy scanning or worn out and no longer scannable.
  - ramraj07 3y ago
    I pay by upi multiple times a day and haven’t had a single instance of a bad QR code.
- gmerc 3y ago
  It’s not just QR. Plenty of other modes of payment supported including Whatsapp and Google. The government aggressively manages the system to prevent any single company from getting too much weight and forces them to address scams or other system occurs in almost real time by the threat of being thrown off the rails.
  - wtmt 3y ago
    > The government aggressively manages the system to prevent any single company from getting too much weight and forces them to address scams or other system occurs in almost real time by the threat of being thrown off the rails. It’s actually shocking that only a few years ago RBI was concerned about concentration risk of having NPCI (the platform operator of UPI) and invited proposals from banks and companies for NUE (New Umbrella Entity) licenses. Then something changed and it canceled all those proposals. NPCI has a monopoly on instant fund transfers (leaving aside the RBI run RTGS). NPCI wants to limit concentration risk among its clients by trying to push for lower market share among competitors within its platform, like Google Pay or WhatsApp Pay. As for scams, there are plenty of them on UPI every single day, and there’s no way to get any fraudulently transferred funds back without filing a police complaint and waiting for them to do their jobs (and greasing their palms depending on the amount for the job to be done).
- notsahil 3y ago
  UPI isn't QR based it you can also use UPI ID, which is like email. For eg: example@provider And most UPI are linked with phone number, so you can also pay via phone number if UPI is linked with it.
  - kmlx 3y ago
    phone numbers aren’t secure at all thou.
    - chupchap 3y ago
      How so?
      - kmlx 3y ago
        https://eu.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/07/27/cell-phone-number-more-important-less-secure-twitter-password-column/820232002/ https://eu.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/07/27/cell-phone-... it's literally one of the least secure things you can have.
        chupchap 3y ago
        UPI doesn't just work based on phone number. Phone number is just the username equivalent in this context. You still need to put in a pin.
- perryizgr8 3y ago
  The problem with apple pay is that it is inaccessible to 80% of the population.
  - ztrww 3y ago
    Apple Pay (unless you use it to pay online) is just wallet app for debit/credit cards, Android has the same thing. I guess in Europe there is just much less demand for systems like this because NFC terminals are you ubiquitous.
- sateesh 3y ago
  Just curious, why you hate QR code system ?
toomuchtodo 3y ago
US FedNow instant payments are live, just going to take some time to ramp volume.
egghese 3y ago
UPI is an impressive system, I use it often and it is quite empowering for billions of Indians. But calling it the "best payment system in the world"! And west wants it so bad sounds like blind exaggerations. United States is not the only western country. Scandinavian countries has Swish (2012), Vipps (2013), and Mobile pay (2015), Canada has Interac.
- ramraj07 3y ago
  Others have the system but is it as good and seamless as the Indian one?
  - RandomLensman 3y ago
    Depends on what you mean. Instant transfers up to €100k work in Europe's SEPA (and you can indeed use a QR to encode the transfer information with most bank apps, I think). And there is of course the usual contact-less payment stuff at merchants.
    - isbvhodnvemrwvn 3y ago
      That's still not as easy as app payments. There are a number of systems like BLIK in Poland where you have a lower max payment amount, but you just give somebody a temporary 6 digit number and approve the amount they withdraw, that's it. For trusted payment channels you just approve. If you initiate the payment, just give phone number of recipient.
      - RandomLensman 3y ago
        Agreed, but I think for places with a mature payments and debit infrastructure there isn't that much additional business and I suspect most banks' apps will just incorporate that like they do with NFC payments. Most growth in payments is either new markets or markets that grow a lot, but not completion of rather mature markets (and additional services).
        3y ago
whizzter 3y ago
Don't confuse the check wielding Americans for the "west", for example Sweden/Norway/Finland has similar systems named Swish/Vipps/MobilePay (Phone number based with scannable QR codes,etc) that's taken over between people and smaller merchants (even young people organizing raves use Swish payments on-site despite it being potentially traceable) and the banks/companies involved in those services are now in the process of building cross-national support that probably will let other countries join soon. I think the main takeaway is that phones and capable app ecosystems was a "hidden" disruption enabler vis-a-vis the traditional credit card processing companies that various actors in various countries has taken advantage of now, the big question is if/when they will make this internationally interoperable (considering the trouble foreigners in Sweden has with being excluded from these "easy" payments that at best requires a card or at worst cash it's an area that needs fixing).
- chillbill 3y ago
  Oh swish is traceable and actively monitored. A few college friends of mine were organizing a party and they all chipped in a 100 kr to one guy (about 25 individuals) who got a call the next day from his bank for suspicious activity.
  - whizzter 3y ago
    Interesting to hear, I've heard of Swish has been a bit on edge trying to upsell people on merchant accounts and I wouldn't be surprised if some of these reports go to the tax office. Still for those involved they wouldn't probably care too much as long as there isn't real-time reporting to the police to get events shut down (although with laxer laws in that area that'll probably fade as an concern).
- sureglymop 3y ago
  There is a similar thing in Switzerland called "Twint".
- dotnet00 3y ago
  "Check wielding Americans"? Haven't needed my checkbook in many years now, almost everywhere has tap-to-pay and the rare place which doesn't has a chip reader.
n_ary 3y ago
Not sure about US, here in Germany, I really love the tap-pay(NFC based) usually everywhere(except some random kebab shops). It simply works regardless of me having an Android/iPhone or simply just a the nfc enabled card. I don’t need to open another account, fumble with one-more-app or anything. Also apple-pay appears to mask my CC/DC number as well, so better safety. I want it everywhere badly in west as well as east and middle(-east). I am familiar with UPI and few similar things in other neighbouring countries(looks like every SEA country has its own entirely different version of it and some country has almost 4-6 competing copy-cats!).
- user_7832 3y ago
  I’m sure your nfc card/phone works great in Germany but it’s worth noting that part of the reason is that your card is likely Mastercard/visa. Here in the Netherlands tap and pay is also seamless with maestro cards… but the moment you try to use it internationally, POS machines reject it (“out of network” or something). If you have a diner’s card or an American Express card you might notice how many terminals/pos’es reject those as well.
  - kmlx 3y ago
    netherlands has always been an outlier when it comes to card payments.
    - user_7832 3y ago
      With regards to maestro, yes sure, but I think diner’s etc (aka anything non visa/Mastercard) have issues internationally.
      - kmlx 3y ago
        diner’s maybe. but i never had a problem with my mastercard or visa. even my amex is widely supported.
        3y ago
kmlx 3y ago
> They want it so bad in the West! i don’t think so. in the UK NFC payments via the phone’s wallet are ubiquitous.
Indian_in_US 3y ago
I‘m Indian living in US. I would rather prefer NFC solution like credit card attached to Apple Pay over UPI. Once you use NFC with Apple Pay you are not going back to UPI. Plus credit card comes with fraud protection and credit card points that I can use for more travel.

db1234 3y ago

The most incredible thing about UPI is how it was embraced by even the poorest in the remote corners of India. One of the former finance ministers of India talked in a dismissive tone in the parliament about rural India adopting digital payments when the current government announced "Digital India" plan. Some one made a meme video out of it mocking him. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCnv8gwN0ug https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCnv8gwN0ug Another video showing the ingenuity of a road side vendor https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uY2156ecRDQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uY2156ecRDQ

gmerc 3y ago
Jiophone helped a lot
- mavelikara 3y ago
  Pulling currency from circulation overnight also did.
  - hiyer 3y ago
    Not so much, actually. What really led to the rapid uptake of UPI was Covid and people's reluctance to handle cash as a result of it.
    - unmole 3y ago
      > What really led to the rapid uptake of UPI was Covid and people's reluctance to handle cash as a result of it. That timeline doesn't make sense. UPI was already a spectacular success by 2019.
      - sateesh 3y ago
        In 2019 it was gaining traction, as the article shows the volume of transactions were around 1 billion per month in March 2019.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

bayesianbot 3y ago

Thailand has a similar system - you use your banking app to scan a QR code, either the code is generated and has the amount included or it's printed static paper and you write the amount yourself, then show the receipt to the merchant or they check the notification in their phone. Started in 2017, nowadays it's everywhere, I can go to local market and pay $0.5 products with it. My 12 year old daughter opened her own account as well and didn't need my help, only installed an app and went to ATM that has a special slot for ID card to verify identity. Quite convenient as no need to carry cash anymore.

bheadmaster 3y ago
Quite convenient for tracking people's consumption choices and discriminating based on them. Hi there! We've noticed an increase of fast food purchases in the log of your account. Therefore your medical insurance premiums have risen by 200% to accomodate the change. For lessened prices, you might want to start consuming our Healthy Food(TM) lunch packs by EvilCorp, made out of bugs for the good of the environment :)
- LiamPowell 3y ago
  Why could this not also be done with currently used card systems?
  - piuantiderp 3y ago
    Mostly because the systems are old, limited in the amount of data they generate.
    - alexchamberlain 3y ago
      They are definitely generating and analysing this data in the US. I believe the data protection laws in the UK and EU prevent it here, at least to the scale. There is no doubt it could be done though - it's the same basic technology with a different transport mechanism and/or intermediary.
  - 3y ago

jimsimmons 3y ago

The day after demonetisation was announced every news paper in India carried a front page ad with the PM batting for Chinese backed PayTM. The UPI revolution happened despite Modi, not because of him in the slightest.

gmerc 3y ago
That’s … not correct. Modi’s demonetization was a huge forced driver of digital payment adoption. It’s what spurred most companies into kicking off their UPI efforts
- jimsimmons 3y ago
  Why was the PM advertising for a 3rd party wallet? The goal of demonetisation has never been clear. It was a thuglaq move and Indian right wing has retro fitted motivations to it.
  - unmole 3y ago
    > Why was the PM advertising for a 3rd party wallet? He wasn't. This was PayTM making hay when the sun shone. And obviously glorifying the Dear Leader has its benefits.
    - jimsimmons 3y ago
      So I can use his pic to promote any private business I want? That brazenly and without permission?
      - unmole 3y ago
        Why would the Dear Leader object to more photographs of him in circulation?
- instagraham 3y ago
  Shooting several people in a bid to get them to hospital to have their corneas scanned for cataracts can also lead to lower cataract rates. That doesn't make it the best way to get people to scan for cataracts.

ETH_start 3y ago

Many countries have a single dominant privately owned e-cash system. The only alternative to a future with centralized financial systems, where the individual's right to transact won't be at the total mercy of the whims of forces they don't control (e.g. a corporation which deems their credit risk as unacceptably high, a political zeitgeist that deems their unwillingness to get vaccinated as making them deserving financial isolation, an authoritarian regime deeming their political outspokenness as too great a threat to their power, etc) is the ascendance of a permissionless decentralized financial system using a ledger with distributed consensus, like the public blockchain.

pgeorgi 3y ago
> like the public blockchain Since this thread is about an article celebrating UPI's 10B transactions/month: That means between 4133 (28 days/month) and 3733 (31 days/month) transactions per second on average. Bitcoin is at 7 transactions per second. The bitcoin blockchain takes ~500GB these days. At UPI's transaction volume, it'd take 250TB by now, replicated at various sites. Whatever you think of blockchain, it has some serious work ahead.
- ETH_start 3y ago
  That's an excellent point, as scalability has been the critical handicap of public blockchains to date. This article is nearly two years old, but provides a good overview of the latest techniques devised for achieving scalability in public blockchains: https://polynya.medium.com/rollups-data-availability-layers-modular-blockchains-introductory-meta-post-5a1e7a60119d https://polynya.medium.com/rollups-data-availability-layers-... Since then, layer 2s (which are the principal execution layer of the modular blockchain stack the article above expounds upon) have seen exponential growth in adoption, and mounting innovations bringing them progressively closer to their theoretical potential of 100,000 transactions per second: https://l2beat.com/scaling/activity https://l2beat.com/scaling/activity
  - chx 3y ago
    > scalability has been the critical handicap of public blockchains to date. Also, the blatant scam nature of them is a bit of a problem. While there's a lot of hype, the Washington Post already printed the truth in 2015 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/06/08/bitcoin-isnt-the-future-of-money-its-either-a-ponzi-scheme-or-a-pyramid-scheme/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/06/08/bitco... which an economy professor have nicely expanded on in two blog posts https://ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2020-12-31-bitcoin-ponzi.html https://ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2020-12-31-bitcoin-pon... https://www.ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2021-01-16-yes-ponzi.html https://www.ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2021-01-16-yes-pon...

mehulagrawal 3y ago

That's >50% of monthly global Visa transactions [1]. Monthly volume at ~$190 billion [2], as compared to ~$1 trillion monthly volume for Visa globally [3]. Pretty good, given that most banks have daily UPI limits of $1200, and much lower individual transaction limits. [1] https://www.thenationalnews.com/business/technology/2023/07/25/visa-profit-surges-on-higher-cross-border-transactions/ https://www.thenationalnews.com/business/technology/2023/07/... [2] https://www.cnbctv18.com/technology/upi-monthly-transaction-volumes-value-august-historic-10-billion-mark-cross-payments-17683881.htm https://www.cnbctv18.com/technology/upi-monthly-transaction-... [3] https://annualreport.visa.com/financials/default.aspx https://annualreport.visa.com/financials/default.aspx

kumarvvr 3y ago
It's 1200 USD per day.
- mehulagrawal 3y ago
  "daily UPI limits of $1200"

albert_e 3y ago

All positives are accepted. Concerns -- - Cronies of government have captured the technology stack making themselves key players that can control and monetize this space. - Traceability of all petty transactions -- enabling building of super rich profile of individuals / orgs -- ripe with potential for misuse. - Leaving a trail of your PII like name / UPI ID (which in some cases is your mobilenumber@upiprovider) / last few digits of bank account number etc with all random people you transact with -- like taking a rikshaw ride or buying potatoes in a street-side vegetable market. (99.9% of these are harmless -- but the small fraction can invite intrusion / enable harassment) - Over enthusiastic adoption of digital payments to the exclusion of other options forcing people to use apps. And the newer payment mechanisms -- opening newer avenues for scamming the less savvy / elderly / vulnerable. - Pushing this change to people rather than letting the benefits and convenience naturally lead to adoption -- after the flaws are slowly uncovered and fixed through early adoption by savvy people (see Demonetization of 2016) - This blind worship of technology as a silver bullet that cannot be criticized (or you are labelled a foreign-sponsored detractor / anti-national / india-hater whatever) extends more broadly into adjacent areas like the Aadhaar national ID system, linking of it to all spheres of citizen services from birth to death including voting rights and banking.

DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
> Traceability of all petty transactions -- enabling building of super rich profile of individuals / orgs -- ripe with potential for misuse. How is that any different to what Visa and Mastercard can do? Speaking for myself, *every* purchase I make now, no matter how petty, is made with credit or debit-cards which go through their payment networks. The only exceptions are my house' landscaping (still uses paper cheques), buying weed (all my local dispensaries in WA are cash-only due to the federal bank embargo on the legal cannabis industry), or personal transfers over Zelle/PayPal/Venmo - so I'm sure Mr. Mastercard has compiled quite the dossier on me by now.
- sateesh 3y ago
  Not op, prior to UPI all these transactions were done using cash, credit card penentration in India was quite low.

ChrisArchitect 3y ago

For the uninformed, is this like the Interac system in Canada?

yaymanish 3y ago
Nah, For a system similar to Interac they have NEFT, RTGS and IMPS which are bank acc to bank acc transfer. UPI requires bank account but you need UPI id to transfer the fund.
- wtmt 3y ago
  > UPI requires bank account but you need UPI id to transfer the fund. UPI requires a bank account, a mobile phone number linked to the bank account and a smartphone to transfer funds for anything other than a trivially small payment (tiny payments are now supported on feature phones).
nafey 3y ago
Interac is not real time. UPI is completely real time and money gets debited from your account and deposited to the merchants account instantly.
_xnmw 3y ago
Not nearly as convenient. Do you use Interac to pay for a $1.50 coffee regularly straight from your phone? Send money to a friend without needing to exchange emails/phone/passwords? Be completely fee-less no matter what bank you use? Not require "acceptance" on the other end? Be notified and require approval before a merchant can debit your account? From what I understand, UPI has all of these things and Interac does not.
- eldaisfish 3y ago
  UPI is not free and people should really stop parroting that talking point. It is free, FOR NOW. There are plans in place to charge a 1.1% fee for transactions to merchants. The indian government claims that there will be savings via banks handling less cash but it provided exactly zero in the way of calculations, estimates or data. In 2022, the indian digital payment industry expected a net loss of around 60 million USD.

dang 3y ago

Related. Others? A digital payments revolution in India - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36011978 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36011978 - May 2023 (165 comments) Tiny, cheap smart speakers unlocked the rise of digital payments in India - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35440608 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35440608 - April 2023 (142 comments) Why peer to peer digital payment system UPI should remain free in India - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32821955 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32821955 - Sept 2022 (41 comments) India leaps ahead on payments - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31970992 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31970992 - July 2022 (4 comments) UPI: India's Unified Payments Interface - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24094323 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24094323 - Aug 2020 (178 comments)

spraveenitpro 3y ago

[dead]

omeysalvi 3y ago

UPI payments used to be a little hit or miss a few years ago but they have been almost flawless for me over the last year. Apps have matured and show a warning if the recipient or self network is down rather than initiating a transaction that might never complete. The only roadblock now is to figure out a way to handle large volume days such as new years when the network is overwhelmed at night.

colesantiago 3y ago

UPI is one of the best payment systems invented and in under 10 years has more transactions, use cases and ease of use than cryptocurrencies which is clearly terrible for payments. This shows that UPI has the potential to scale beyond India yet crypto cannot scale at all.

JyB 3y ago
They are fundamentally different.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- colesantiago 3y ago
  So explain how?
  - postcynical 3y ago
    There is no 1200$ limit on crypto transactions.
jongjong 3y ago
As we see more of these payment systems emerge, crypto will become more important. The thing about large centralized systems it that sooner or later, they will end up with more virtual units than they can back with real currency and there will be a run on these platforms. History may not repeat itself, but it rhymes. Centralized systems are inherently unreliable and impossible to reliably audit as they can self-report anything. Whatever that single database system reports is treated as true, end of story. Nobody else can verify or contest. The fiat monetary system is itself just made up of a large number of centralized banking systems which have probably issued more units than they claim/believe. But the critical difference from private payment systems is that because the banking systems are treated as the sources of truth to represent the national currency, they can never run out of units. The way this problem will manifest itself is probably through inflation as the banks will have all these new currency units being created out of thin air due to thousands of different system flaws or exploits across thousands of different systems... These counterfeited digital units will be accepted as payment just like legitimate digital units; there will be no way to tell the difference as all the banks inherently trust each other (see correspondent banking). Essentially, fraudsters will control much of the new money minted by various centralized systems which will give them a lot of power in the markets. The reason why crypto is important is that it's publicly auditable and cannot be counterfeited (neither accidentally nor intentionally). I believe that eventually, most economic participants will not be able to get a hold of the national fiat currency no matter how hard they work or how valuable their work is but some other people will have no difficulty getting hold of that fiat currency and they won't work at all (they won't need to). This contrast is going to be the catalyst that causes people to move to crypto as it will cause hyperinflation due to large fiat holders being unproductive members of society and crypto holders being comparatively productive.

ufodktztd 3y ago

better title is, they have 10B of citizen relationship data. the same data you get off you sum up visa and Facebook and Google and Verizon. nobody gets the scale of this data. visa and mc see the writing on the wall. that's why they raise rates earlier this week. it's their last breath on the markets they still hold.

me551ah 3y ago

The major difference between UPI payments and Credit Cards is that there is no 'surcharge'. This is what makes it very viable for small merchants to accept payments of minimal amounts.

wtmt 3y ago
This is why banks have never been happy with UPI because their costs to support aren’t fully recovered and it’s a drain. They’ve supported it mainly because of the government pushing them to. MDR (the charges the merchants pay) started coming to UPI too, a few months ago. The “free” party won’t last a lot longer.
- vinay_ys 3y ago
  UPI payments to merchants have had MDR for a while now. And there is a government fund to compensate banks as well. Cost on its own isn't the real reason for banks to be unhappy. Banks were unhappy because they were not used to this kind of pace of feature growth and user growth. It put operational stress on their teams and their relatively old systems (much newer than western banks). They also saw it as a zero-sum game where UPI had opportunity cost w.r.t growth/profit in credit cards. But the reality is somewhat different. Affluent class still uses credit cards (for loyalty points, irony!) and cards market has grown quite well too. And as digital usage expands and banks have embraced digital, they see UPI as an engagement driver and they make money on selling other financial products including credit cards and loans. Anyone who isn't thinking this way will be killed by competition soon enough.
perfopt 3y ago
This is exactly why banks are unhappy - they have to bear the infra cost. This is also the reason the government is trying to push UPI wallet. I suspect at some future point UPI (non-wallet) transactions will be charged a small fee and wallet transactions will not.
- blackoil 3y ago
  Banks are in general happy as any cost is offset by reduction in cash handling cot. ATMs installation and maintenance are costly, branches even more so, you can reduce that. Also, for the merchants, cash handling cost is greater than 0. > I suspect at some future point UPI (non-wallet) transactions will be charged a small fee and wallet transactions will not. Right now, it is other way round. Wallet transactions above ₹2000 attract some fees for merchants.

laurels-marts 3y ago

I this something like iDeal in Netherlands for online payments or Apple Pay for physical payments? How does it compare to both?

SpacePortKnight 3y ago
It's both. You can transfer/receive money to/from anyone with either a QR code, a UPI address like `batman@upi` or a mobile number. You can also setup mandates (autopay) for recurring subscriptions like Netfix. Unlike Credit Cards, you can even bypass the merchant and directly cancel an autopay through a UPI payment app.

sirius87 3y ago

The next leg of growth for UPI is already underway with the inclusion of RuPay credit cards under UPI. Until last year, UPI transactions would directly hit your bank account balance and flood your bank statement with many small purchase entries. Linking a RuPay [1] credit card to a UPI app provider such as Google Pay in India allows users to pay through their credit card [2]. This will in turn boost transaction volume on India's indigenous RuPay payment network, and it will probably show its impact on Visa and Mastercard. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RuPay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RuPay [2] https://www.livemint.com/news/india/google-pay-brings-rupay-credit-card-based-upi-payments-how-to-use-11684841757796.html https://www.livemint.com/news/india/google-pay-brings-rupay-...

davelondon 3y ago

I was in India earlier this year, and found there was no way (and I spent hours trying) for a foreigner to get access to the UPI system. This meant: 1) There were some cashless fast food outlets that I couldn't eat at 2) There was no way for me to book an intercity bus ticket I eventually managed to get a bus ticket by sweet-talking someone in a shop to use their personal UPI account in exchange for cash. I fear there's going to be more problems like this for travellers as communities go cashless around the world.

itsbits 3y ago
Now Indian airports have outlets to create UPIs for foreigners visiting the country
- dilliwal 3y ago
  any source?
- Mandatum 3y ago
  Can’t wait to hand over my passport and drivers license to some random person after security wearing a uniform and holding an iPad after I get off an 8 hour red-eye. Surely nothing can go wrong.
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  - sofixa 3y ago
    It's the same as the kiosks to get a local SIM card which also often require ID. Also optional. > drivers license A driver's license is rarely accepted as a valid ID document outside of the US which rarely has anything better.
    - 3y ago

SpacePortKnight 3y ago

India's largest denomination banknote is now just Rs. 500 or $6 after their recent ban on the Rs. 2000 notes. Thus, online payment becomes the only way to transfer any meaningful amount.

shivz45 3y ago

https://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Kochi/traders-wary-of-accepting-upi-based-payments-after-freezing-of-accounts/article66728754.ece https://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Kochi/traders-wary-of-a...

tacocataco 3y ago

I really really don't care what cash transfer app we go with, I just want to only have one app and for it to NEVER change. Ideally, there would be regulated advisarial integration between the apps. That way if you had venmo and they had cashapp, it would still work! Let these companies compete on UX and financial instruments, not creating a walled garden of users and hoping they get the most inertia. We made it work with phone networks, I think we could handle this.

wtmt 3y ago
For UPI, which is created and run by NPCI (an organization comprising a consortium of private and public banks), there is an “official” app called BHIM (Bharat Interface for Money). Anyone who has it doesn’t have to worry if the other person is using Google Pay or WhatsApp Pay or another app. Banks also have their own UPI apps or include the UPI feature in their banking app. All these apps work on the same platform, which is UPI, which in turn is supported by all banks.
legends2k 3y ago
I've not used any third party UPIs. I've been using BHIM UPI since 2020 _almost_ without issues.
xrisk 3y ago
Well that’s the point, UPI is literally interoperable and you can use any app you want and it just works. It’s not Indian’s fault that there is no such standard worldwide.
- kmlx 3y ago
  there is already a standard. it's SEPA/SWIFT and works on IBANs independent of any banks. but it's use case is tiny in most of the world. most payments aren't made to people you want to give money to. most payments actually go to sellers. as such what people use in developed countries is their credit card.
  - vaccarium 3y ago

Brajeshwar 3y ago

I’ve been using UPI since its very early days when it used to fail quite often. UPI is still one of the best things to happen in the financial scene in India. However, these days, personally, I’m trying to reduce it to either known people, or established institutions. I wish there is another layer of tokenization when one pays via UPI, like how Apple Pay does. I wish that the transaction is obfuscated and the phone numbers and/or UPI ID are hidden. You pay for a nice hot cup of ₹10 Chai on the streets but then you got a phone call later on - naively to upsell something, or the next step up, trying to scam you. Unlike me, my wife continues to pick up every incoming phone calls. We have had enough calls from people whom she paid via UPI trying to sell or this/that and what not. There is a scam going on in India. Random females, who are either naked or scantily clothed, will call up on WhatsApp Video. If you pick up the call, say while in the bathroom and not fully clothed, they will take screenshots and threaten you that they will make that picture “viral” to extort money. I won't be surprised if there is an under-belly of phone numbers and other data being sold that were collected via UPI payment transactions. Cash is still OK at the tea-stalls, the random shop, etc. Well, when I just wanted to have a simple Bombay’s cutting-chai but the chai-guy wants my phone number, and everything else -- I'm not comfortable with that.

crop_rotation 3y ago
Using ICICI bank iMobile you can create a random UPI id totally unrelated to your phone number I agree with the problems you mention, and in general there is an increasing trend of taking phone numbers of customers in India, e.g. once at a Nike store, I was told the purchase couldn't be complete without the phone number.
- vinay_ys 3y ago
  I refuse to give phone numbers and usually the cashier will enter their own fake phone number to let the system proceed further. Some shops like decathlon tried to force us to install their app, create an account and then scan and pay through that – at the cashier counter. I just left the entire shopping cart there and walked out without purchasing. Such crazy things do happen but those companies will learn the lesson quickly as Indians are quite savvy about these things.

igetspam 3y ago

That's a lot of messages moving around. Kafka?

SolomonLijo 3y ago

I think UPI is one of the best decisions in the financial sector of India and w/ better infrastructure, it can do a lot more!

SolomonLijo 3y ago
Better infrastructure, in some parts of the country are needed, a lot (1)! There's also a lot of merchants of some parts of India that do not accept UPI-Payments (2) and so if these were fixed - we will have an in-destructible financial service, at the hands of each and every person. 1 - In many cases for my Dad, it had failed due to poor internet in the area. 2 - I heard from an article that a lot of merchants in Mumbai do not accept them.

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avl999 3y ago

I was recently in India a few weeks ago for a friend's wedding. I am not an Indian national/citizen/whatever and my experience related to anything tech and money was absolute awful (esp the obsession with OTPs) * The problems start as soon as you land at the airport. I land at the Delhi airport, my friend has sent a driver to pick me up and gave me his contact info. I try to connect to Airport wifi and bam it's asking me for an Indian number to text an OTP to connect to the public WiFi. Why is having an indian number at the Delhi INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT an expectation? What do they expect foreign travelers to do? Ridiculous. Luckily I found someone and asked to use their phone to whatsapp the driver and figure out where he was. * Foreign credit cards are hit and miss. I have 2 credit cards, I let my bank know I would be traveling and I still could not reliably use them, they worked maybe a fraction of the time. Apparently Indian government added some "security" requirements earlier this year to "prevent fraud" that ices out a large number of foreign cards at many payment tills. This essentially makes India a cash-only economy for foreign tourists. * If you try to use your foreign cards while shopping, many places will ask to send an OTP to your (indian) number even for relatively small amount of money involved, and again as a foreigner you are out of luck. * Since I can't use my cards reliably, I am now forced to carry around cash. Worse... the highest denomination available is 500 rupeees, which is equivalent to about $6. This means that if you are planning on doing any type of shopping as a foreigner you have to carry a fat wad of cash on your person the entire time. I intended to do some shopping, eating out and drinking which meant I had to carry around 20,000 ruppees at all times, which was neither comfortably due to how fat that wad of cash is, not relaxing as I am constantly worried about losing it. * I finally decided to get an Indian phone number to get around all the OTP nonsense and get some data while walking around. And bam to get an Indian sim card you need an indian ID or as a foreigner go through an application process involving a bunch of documentation (and not trivial documentation, requirements like a picture that matches the exact dimensions accepted by them) and it's not a quick process. Red tape upon red tape to get a sim card for normal usage! Thankfully, someone helped me out with a SIM card they purchased via their govt ID and gave it to me saving me the pain. * The pain doesn't end here. After I get my sim card, I realize I need to buy a bit more data. Easy enough I think in my head... there's even an app from the provider! I pick the upgraded plan and try to buy via my credit card and boom, international credit cards are not accepted for e-transactions. I literally just want to give them the equivalent of $10 to get an additional 25 gigs of data and I can't do it online. Again, I asked someone to buy it for me and paid them in cash. * Then I wanted to buy a friend a gift that is only available on Amazon. The red tape strikes, apparently as of this year Amazon India can no longer accept foreign credit cards as methods of payment due to "security and anti-fraud requirements" by the indian govt. Again, I have to find someone to buy it for me from Amazon using their card and pay them cash for it. The bad is that everything is so needlessly complicated and red-tapey for foreigners. Things that should be trivial are hard. The good is that you can always find someone to help you circumvent the red-tape by paying them cash :).

porkbeer 3y ago

When you ban cash to control your populace, of coure an alternative becomes essential. Hardly worth celebrating our peicemeal subjugation.