National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) said the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) is live and currently available for customers of 21 banks. UPI is a payment solution which empowers a recipient to initiate the payment request from a smartphone. It facilitates ‘virtual payment address’ as a payment identifier for sending and collecting money and works on single click 2-factor authentication.

• “Real-time sending and receiving money through a mobile application at such a scale on inter-operable basis had not been attempted anywhere else in the world. Now the UPI app will be made available on Google Play Store by banks,” NPCI Managing Director and CEO AP Hota said .

• Some of the banks which are going live with UPI are –Andhra Bank, Axis Bank, Bank of Maharashtra, Bharatiya Mahila Bank, Canara Bank, Oriental Bank of Commerce, Union Bank of India and Vijaya Bank, among others.
• The purpose of pilot run was to ensure that technical glitches, if any, are fixed and the product gives a smooth experience for immediate pay and collect with Virtual Payment Address (VPA), NPCI said.

• NPCI had decided that only the banks with 1,000 pilot customers, 5,000 transactions and success rate of around 80 percent would be permitted to go live.