Now Use UPI Payment Without Internet and Smartphone; Check Details

Unified Payments Interface (UPI) payments no longer require a smartphone or an internet connection. The Reserve Bank of India is planning to launch UPI123Pay on Tuesday in order to connect lakhs of feature phone users to the country’s digital payment ecosystem. “Watch out for RBI Governor @DasShaktikanta’s introduction of UPI for feature phones – UPI123Pay and 24*7 helpdesk for digital payments – DigiSaathi at 12 noon on March 08, 2022,” the Indian central bank tweeted on Twitter.

Individuals will be able to make direct payments to others via UPI via feature phones as well with this new way of digital payments. At the moment, UPI payments are only available to smartphone users with internet access.

In recent years, especially following demonetization, UPI has become one of the most popular modes of payment. It is the country’s single largest retail payment system in terms of transaction volume, suggesting widespread popularity.

Why Use UPI Payment for Feature Phones?

On November 8, 2021, RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das announced the launch of a UPI-based payment system for feature phones. He also stated “In order to further deepen digital payments and make them more inclusive, ease transactions for consumers, facilitate greater participation of retail customers in various segments of the financial markets and enhance the capacity of service providers, it is proposed to launch UPI-based payment products for feature phone users leveraging on the Reserve Bank’s regulatory Sandbox on Retail Payments.” 

This procedure will make the small-value transactions simpler than ever “through a mechanism of ‘on-device’ wallet in UPI applications.”

The Central Bank earlier stated “India has a large mobile phone consumer base of about 118 crore mobile users (TRAI, October 2021)1 of which about 74 crore (Statista, July 2021) have smart phones indicating that there is a significant number of feature phone users in the country. Feature phone users have limited access to innovative payment products.” 

Reserve Bank of India also stated “To deepen financial penetration, it is important to bring feature phone users into the mainstream digital payments. In the first cohort of RBI Regulatory Sandbox, some innovators had successfully demonstrated their solutions for feature phone payments under the theme of ‘Retail Payments’. These products, coupled with other complimentary solutions, will facilitate UPI-based digital payment solutions on feature phones to promote wider digitization.” 

How UPI123Pay is Going to Help you?

Siddharth Maurya, Resource Specialist at Fund Management said, “Popular UPI payment platforms such as PhonePe, Google Pay, Paytm are now more than just payment tools and transforming into full-stack financial service providers. As digital payment systems are set to trump offline transactions, increasing the limit is a welcome step. This is also in sync with the government’s long-term agenda to build start-up India and Digital India.”

Source: News 18