Just think of a future where you don’t need to carry cards and all
of your transactions are done instantly using a mobile phone. This is soon going
to be a reality. The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) is launching unified payments interface that makes your mobile phone
as useful as a virtual debit card.
The interface will allow all the account holders across all the banks
to send and receive money from their smartphones using mobile number, Aadhaar number and a virtual payment address without
entering any bank account information.
This is part of the efforts of the Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI’s)
to ‘achieve a less cash society’. Today the number of non-cash transactions per
person is just six per year. And only a part of the 10 million plus retailers have card payment acceptance infrastructure in our country and presently it is
nearly 0.6 million.
Banks and the regulator are trying to develop infrastructure that
enables all kinds of transactions using mobile phones to change the present
scenario. A report from NPCI suggests that about 150 million smartphone users exist today
and this number is expected to come to 500 million in the next 5 years.
The transaction will work similar to National Electronic Funds Transfers
(NEFT) which is used for online transactions. You only need to add a beneficiary
and once authenticated then the fund transfers can be started. The banks that are using unified payment gateway will offer more
features which would be available 24/7. The account authentication will be
instant too.
According to the paper issued by NPCI, this system will be as secure as NEFT. The system
will authenticate the profile using mobile and Aadhaar number of the sender and
receiver during every transaction between individuals. For transactions that
involve entities, the authentication will involve details like PAN Card number.
In addition, none of the information such as PIN, biometrics, passwords, and so
on will be stored by the bankers. So this would be very convenient and safe for
the users.