Speak & Pay Will Be The Next Innovation Within Fintech: Amazon Pay India’s Vikas Bansal

The payments ecosystem has evolved a lot over the centuries – from cards to cheques to cards with pins to swipe and pay, and tap and pay now. The next big innovation in this ecosystem will be ‘speak & pay’, Vikas Bansal, Director, Amazon Pay India, said.

Speaking during the panel discussion on ‘How Payment Innovations Can Help Ecommerce Reach $400 Bn Potential’ on Day 2 of Inc42’s Fintech Summit 2022, Bansal said, “Voice is the next big frontier. We need innovation. For instance, we are trying the same through Alexa. Today, you can just ask Alexa to pay your bill and you know safely, Alexa ends up paying your bill. We need similar protocols and standards for voice authentication, and the likes, to make payments truly invisible.” 

Talking about the next innovations in the payments ecosystem, Bansal said that decentralised finance will replace slow, costly, inefficient modes of cross-border payments.

While a lot of innovation and regulatory enablement will be needed, decentralised finance will solve fundamental problems that exist in finance today, he said. Bansal also mentioned some use cases, like removing the need for multiple KYCs, geographical restrictions to fund flow, and making fund transfers cheaper.

While voice authenticated payments are not yet prevalent, the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), India’s widely used real-time payments system, is trying a feature phone payment module via sound waves. 

In partnership with startups such as ToneTag, whose founder Kumar Abhishek was also part of the panel, the UPI will allow users to use the app on their feature phones. The selected interface will generate a sound wave, which a receiver present at the merchant outlet can pick up and decode as a payment made to the merchant. 

However, the idea of ‘Speak & Pay’, suggested by Bansal, is not yet in play, despite the voice command feature becoming a fairly mainstream notion due to the use of Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant. 

The concept of voice payments has been around for some time now. It will likely involve linking a credit/debit card to a device, using a voice command, getting the voice authenticated and speaking the PIN to confirm the payment. 

However, there are obvious security bottlenecks, and as Bansal stated, innovation within the sector will decide if the ‘Speak & Pay’ feature comes to life in the next five years.

Update | July 4, 2022, 11:45 AM

Vikas Bansal’s designation corrected to Director, Amazon Pay India.