On March 8, 2022, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) announced Unified Payments Interface (UPI) services for features phone users as well. Until now, UPI payments were only being accessed by smartphone users. To facilitate the payments system for feature phone users, RBI has launched UPI123Pay. Along with this, RBI launched DigiSaathi, a 24x7 helpline for making digital payments.
What Can UPI123Pay Do?
UPI123Pay is made for people owning feature phones to make offline money transactions. For now, UPI for feature phones will be able to do everything it can in the smartphones except scan and pay. But the work is ongoing for that as well, and in the future, even scan and pay should be available for people with feature phones.
Using UPI123Pay, people living in the rural areas of India who don’t own a smartphone will be able to make online payments as well. This is a good initiative from RBI and one that will propel the growth of Digital India.
UPI was introduced back in 2016, and since then, it has grown a lot. Until now, it remained a system for smartphones only. But with UPI123Pay, feature phone users will be able to make payments offline. This will add to the transaction volume of UPI and will help with RBI’s vision of making India a less-cash economy.
How Will UPI123Pay Work?
First of all, every feature phone user will have to link his/her bank account with the feature phone for using the UPI123Pay facility. For now, the service is only available in Hindi or in English. RBI said that it is working on introducing more language support soon. The transactions for UPI123Pay won’t need an active internet or data connection with the device.
More details about how the service will work step by step are unknown at the moment. As soon as the details are out, we will update the website with a new ‘Step-by-Step’ guide for the same.
