Let me paint you a picture; you’re stranded in the middle of nowhere, in some foreign country, your car battery has been fried, and steam seems not to stop escaping from under the hood. You don’t have any cash on you and the only taxi you can find won’t grant you any credit. What are you going to do? Suddenly having a regulated and accepted UPI in global market, seems like the last failsafe.
If you are a well-read, emerging-trends-accepting person like most of us over here, you’d probably use a QR code to pay off the rickshaw guy, via the internet, on your phone. UPI is the form you use, a system built in place for situations like these as well as people who are on the cusp of accepting the cashless way of consuming. UPI has been accepted, with open arms by, many tech giants all around the world. In recent years (by that we mean, the COVID-19 Pandemic years), UPI systems have become more utilitarian rather than the rupee bills and coins.
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Unified Payments Interface, or UPI, as it is known, is a system of payments developed by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) with the intent of delivering instant, real-time payments via peer-to-peer and peer-to-merchant, inter-bank facilities. This system of payments is regulated by the Reserve Bank of India. A mobile number is required to access this system which is to be registered on a local carrier. UPI is a globally accepted platform that has made ex-pats and every other city that is not Indian to be able to transact money without any worries of being mugged. UPI is secure, hassle-free, and regulated.
UPI gained prominence in the onslaught of the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic drove everyone paranoid; horrified of making transactions for mere groceries with gloves and masks on, a cashless option seemed like the best way to flock towards. UPI is beneficial as a cashless substitute and even gained more notoriety for being the leading form of cashless option accepted by the local population. Rickshaw drivers, street hawkers, loose cigarette selling pan shop owners, mid-sized restaurants, clubs, malls; everyone in every different category of living was, and still is, using UPI. According to the data, there were 358 banks available on the platform as of September 2022, with a monthly transaction volume of 6.7 billion transactions amounting to ₹11.16 lakh crore (US$140 billion).
The secret to UPI in global market is quite simple; convenience. UPI works on an open-source API (Applications Programming Interface), which makes it possible to be on a ton of massively increasing, regulated applications. Google Pay, PhonePe, Paytm, MobiKwik, Amazon Pay, Samsung Pay, WhatsApp Pay as well as BHIM (which is managed by NPCI themselves) are some to name a few. Convenience is the key and UPI has become so engrained with the cashless lifestyle, that this very convenience does not hold any bars, creed, or dedicated sect of society
Everyone can use UPI, anywhere and anytime.
