Offline, Recurring Payments Via UPI To Drive Next Fintech Revolution

India’s phenomenal growth in the fintech space is not new knowledge anymore. Since the demonisation of 2016, things have taken a sharp turn in the fintech space. And now, in a bid to predict what could be the future of payments technology, TiECON Kolkata, on Thursday (January 16) organised a panel discussion with experts from the sector.

While speaking on the topic ‘Future of Money: Trailblazing Digital Transaction’, Raju Shetty, head of engineering at Razorpay, said that while India’s gross domestic product (GDP) stands at around $2.8 Tn to $3 Tn, digital payments in India only accounts for close to $200 Bn of the total transactions. However, with the recent advancements in the fintech space, Shetty said that it is an amazing time to be in this space and predicted that the future is going to be exciting.

Highlighting how Unified Payments Interface (UPI) has transformed the digital payments space, Shwetav Agarwal, chief technology officer (CTO) at PayAbbhi, said that before UPI payments, companies operating digital wallets forced both payee and sender to be on the same application. “Earlier both the payee and sender needed to have the same application for the transfer of money. However, any UPI user can now send money via any UPI-supporting app to other applications using the same technology,” he added.

Explaining how UPI got the traction in the country, Agarwal said the introduction of JAM — Jan Dhan bank account, Aadhaar cards, and the penetration of mobile devices — has helped this technology to boom in the country. Recently, the National Payments Corporation of India announced that UPI recorded 1.31 Bn transactions in December 2019.

On what could be the future of UPI, Agarwal, highlighting the recently introduced recurring payments feature on this technology, said that UPI 2.0 is here. In addition, the PayAbhi’s CTO also said that the offline acceptance of payments via UPI is also providing a major boost to the payments sector in the country.

When being asked about the future of OTP-based transactions, Shetty said that the native transaction experience, which helps the users to complete the transaction on the same application without being redirected to the bank’s portal, is improving the whole user experience. While this feature is only available on leading platforms such as food aggregator Swiggy, ecommerce giant Amazon, the wider adoption of this technology is expected to revolutionise the OTP-based transactions.