The Unified Payments Interface (UPI) has seen strong growth in recent years, due to the simplicity it offers, be it for transferring money from one account to another or for paying bills or making payments. On Wednesday, the National Payment Corporation of India launched UPI AutoPay, a feature that will allow people to use UPI to now make recurring payments.
Under the auto-pay facility, customers can now set up e-mandates for recurring payments such as mobile phone bills, OTT subscriptions, mutual fund payments or monthly loan and insurance payments among other things using any UPI application. This will enable recurring e-mandates up to Rs 2,000. If the amount exceeds Rs 2,000, then customers will have to execute every mandate with a UPI pin.
Dilip Asbe, the MD and CEO of NPCI said that the launch of UPI AutoPay was a step ahead in India’s journey towards digitisation.
“We have been witnessing a lot of changes in the way customers are making recurring payments over the last few years. The UPI AutoPay offering would provide millions of UPI user’s convenience and safety while making recurring payments,” he said.
UPI-enabled applications will now have a mandate section, where customers can create, approve, modify, pause and revoke auto-debit mandates. UPI users can create the e-mandates through UPI ID or QR Scan and can be set up for one-time, daily, weekly, fortnightly, monthly, quarterly, half-yearly or even yearly payments.
The customers have to authenticate their account through UPI PIN for one-time and subsequent payments would be debited automatically.
Axis Bank, Bank of Baroda, ICICI Bank, HDFC Bank, HSBC Bank, IDFC Bank and Paytm Payments Bank have already gone live with UPI AutoPay. Similarly, several fintech companies including RazorPay, Policy Bazaar, CAMS Pay, AutoPe-Delhi Metro and Furlenco—among others—have enabled it.
State Bank of India, the country’s largest lender, Yes Bank as well as Jio Payments are also expected to soon go live with UPI AutoPay.
“We believe this unique facility would enable customers streamline their recurring bill payments and help them get rid of paying those bills manually,” said Rajnish Kumar, chairman of SBI.
He expressed confidence that the coming years would bring various innovative digital payment solutions keeping in mind customer ease of payments convenience as well as safety.
UPI was launched by NPCI in 2016. Since then it has grown significantly in the number of transactions as well as in the value of transactions. In June 2020, UPI registered a transaction volume of 1.34 billion. In value terms, Rs 2.61 lakh crore worth transactions were carried out on the platform.
“Introducing UPI AutoPay is a testament of continuous innovation in the digital payments space. This was also one of the key recommendations of the RBI Committee on Deepening of Digital Payments, which I chaired,” said Nandan Nilekani, chairman and co-founder of Infosys.
Asbe said the AutoPay facility will not only benefit customers but also merchants and the aim is to achieve new milestones by expanding UPI’s presence, especially in the P2M (person-to-merchant) payment space.
