After stalling the launch of the service by many months, the NPCI in the presence of other authorities and RBI officials launched the second iteration of the Unified Payments Interface, UPI 2.0. National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) is the organisation which oversees all the payments in the country and is also the founding organisation of UPI, a service which facilitates quick transfer of funds between two bank accounts via a mobile application without the need of the beneficiary’s account details.
The launch of UPI 2.0 took place in Mumbai, and the event was witnessed by the select members of NPCI which included RBI governor Urjit Patel, State Bank of India (SBI) chairman Rajnish Kumar and the non-executive chairman of Infosys and the innovation advisor at NPCI, Nandan Nilekani. With the new service formally launched, below we have taken a look over what the new UPI 2.0 has to offer and what separates it from its previous version.
Overdraft Account Linking
Now the UPI will allow the users to link their overdraft account in addition to the capability of adding current or savings account. All the benefits which remain exclusive to overdraft accounts will be made available to the UPI 2.0 users besides users will also have access to easy transaction methods for overdraft accounts.
One Time Mandate
One Time mandates will provide the capability to the users to block payment on the present date and pay to another user on a future date. The mandates will be based on a one-time block functionality for transactions. The mandates will allow the merchants and individual users to make future committed payments easily since the amount deducts from the payer’s account automatically when the date of payment arrives.
Invoice from Merchant
This functionality has been introduced to UPI 2.0 to reduces cases of fraudulent payments. Users of UPI will now get an invoice from the merchant before they finalise the payment. This methodology will allow them to check whether or not a payee is a legitimate person or entity. Customers will be able to check the credentials on the invoice itself which will be made available to them instantaneously while making the payment.
QR or Signed Intent
When users scan a QR code provided by the merchant, the UPI 2.0 application will avail information to the users telling them about the authenticity of the merchant. In case NPCI, cannot trace the merchant to be an authenticated UPI vendor then the users will be informed immediately while they scan the QR code.
As reported by Livemint, the current member banks of UPI 2.0 are State Bank of India (SBI), HDFC Bank, Axis Bank, ICICI Bank, IDBI Bank, RBL Bank, YES Bank, Kotak Mahindra Bank, IndusInd Bank, Federal Bank and HSBC. It is also noteworthy that UPI has evolved to become one of the most popular payment services in the country right now as BHIM UPI registered Rs 45,845 crore worth of transactions and 235 million volume of operations by the end of July this year.
