News Excerpt:
In a remarkable feat, India has formally launched its Unified Payments Interface (UPI) at the iconic Eiffel Tower in Paris, France.
More details on news:
- NPCI International Payments Limited (NIPL) and France's Lyra Collect has executed an agreement to implement the Unified Payment Interface (UPI) in France and Europe.
- NIPL is an arm of the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) and Lyra is a French e-commerce and proximity payments company.
- It will help ensure that the UPI payment mechanism is accepted in France.
- At present, Indian tourists rank as the second largest group of international visitors to the Eiffel Tower. With this, Indian tourists can simply scan a QR code generated on the merchant's website and initiate a payment in Indian Rupees as well.
- Eiffel Tower is the first merchant to offer UPI payments in France, and the service will soon be extended to other merchants in the tourism and retail space across France and Europe.
UPI in other countries:
- NPCI has also allowed NRIs living in other countries such as Singapore, Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Oman, Qatar, US, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and the United Kingdom to use UPI using their international mobile numbers for bank accounts which are classified as Non-Resident External (NRE) or Non-Resident Ordinary (NRO) accounts.
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National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI)
- It is an umbrella organisation for operating retail payments and settlement systems in India.
- It is an initiative of Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and Indian Banks’ Association (IBA) under the provisions of the Payment and Settlement Systems Act, 2007, for creating a robust Payment & Settlement Infrastructure in India.
- Considering the utility nature of the objects of NPCI, it has been incorporated as a “Not for Profit” Company under the provisions of Section 25 of Companies Act 1956 (now Section 8 of Companies Act 2013), with an intention to provide infrastructure to the entire Banking system in India for physical as well as electronic payment and settlement systems.
- The Company is focused on bringing innovations in the retail payment systems through the use of technology for achieving greater efficiency in operations and widening the reach of payment systems.
Unified Payments Interface (UPI)
- It is a system that powers multiple bank accounts into a single mobile application (of any participating bank), merging several banking features, seamless fund routing & merchant payments into one hood.
- It also caters to the “Peer to Peer” collect request which can be scheduled and paid as per requirement and convenience.
- With the above context in mind, NPCI conducted a pilot launch with 21 member banks. The pilot launch was on 11th April 2016 by Dr. Raghuram G Rajan, the then Governor, RBI at Mumbai. Banks started to upload their UPI enabled Apps on Google Play store from 25th August, 2016 onwards.
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