Edition #04 - UPI and PayNow linkage, Banks bar the use of ChatGPT, CRED launches BNPL & Tap to pay & more!
In today’s edition
UPI and PayNow linkage - Enables seamless cross-border payments between India and Singapore
In the last week of February 2023, The Prime Minister of India - Narendra Modi, and the Prime Minister of Singapore - Lee Hsien Loong announced the launch of a linkage between UPI in India and PayNow in Singapore.?
Both being extremely common and popular methods of transferring money locally in their respective countries, the partnership between these two payment protocols headed by the RBI(Reserve Bank of India) and MAS(Monetary Authority of Singapore) will enable easier and more economic foreign remittances between citizens in the two nations.
This partnership not only strengthened the economic ties between the two countries by enabling individuals in India to make P2P(Peer to peer) transactions to and from Singapore extremely accessible and vice versa.?
The process was demonstrated live during the announcement which you can watch here. The process was as simple as entering an individual’s phone number, UPI ID, or VPA(Virtual Payment Address) in their respective banking or PayNow app, entering the amount to be transferred and verifying the payment using an OTP or PIN. The transfers were successfully received in a matter of minutes showing how simple it has become to carry out foreign remittances.?
While official announcements are yet to be made, we can soon expect other private and public remittance providers in India and Singapore to implement this feature soon on their platforms as well.?
Major banks in the US join JP Morgan to bar employees from using ChatGPT
If you haven’t heard about ChatGPT recently, then you were probably living under a rock. If you are that person, here’s a quick summary - ChatGPT is an AI text Generative tool. You could sort of call it a Google Search on steroids. Ask it to search for information, solve a math problem, write code, give you ideas for something specific, etc. and it will do it.?
ChatGPT is a pretty powerful tool that can… sorry, that is changing the landscape of how we source and synthesize information. But recently, JP Morgan restricted employees across the organization from using this new tool. Financial News reported that Citigroup and Goldman Sachs Group had barred ChatGPT, while Bloomberg’s report included Bank of America,? Deutsche Bank,? and Wells Fargo on this list.
If you’re wondering why this move was made, there wasn’t any specific incident that took place in order for this mandate to be implemented. It was simply part of controls around third-party software that these institutions tend to have. For many banks, WhatsApp is another tool that is barred.?
Deutsche Bank forbade staffers from using the chatbot and disabled employees’ access to it, while Citigroup and Goldman Sachs Group similarly restricted staffers’ usage of the chatbot through an automated restriction on third-party software.
As part of its controls around third-party software, Wells Fargo told Forbes that it is “imposing usage limits” on ChatGPT and is considering “safe and effective ways” to use chatbots, such as ChatGPT.
It isn’t very surprising to see institutions do this considering the tool is still in its nascent stages and has had its fair share of incorrect or inaccurate data sourcing. And the moment it comes to financial matters, ‘incorrect’ and ‘inaccurate’ are two words financial institutions want to stay far away from.?
Organizations may also have privacy concerns since the tool uses the data that is input, the output, and the user’s feedback on the interaction to enhance itself. We may see more widespread adoption by organizations as we progress and the tool becomes better in terms of security, privacy, and accuracy.?
CRED launches BNPL & Tap to pay offerings
CRED is the Indian FinTech that started off as a tool for tracking and paying credit card bills. Over time it has expanded its offering and has recently launched ‘CRED flash’, its BNPL(buy now, pay later) feature, and a tap-to-pay feature through mobile devices.
CRED flash will let users make purchases through the app to over 500 partner merchants including Swiggy, Zepto, and Urban Company, and pay the bill after 30 days at no extra charge. This is basically a form of credit extended to select CRED users that they can use instantaneously without requiring any OTP or authentication code. This capability will be powered by RBI-registered NBFC Parfait Finance and Investments Pvt Limited.
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The tap-to-pay feature will allow users to pay through their credit cards by just tapping their smartphones on a POS machine. This will first roll out to Android devices that have NFC(Near-field communication) technology. The tap-to-pay method will use card tokenization technology to securely make payments without compromising sensitive details.?
Technology trends impacting the future of banking?
Before the boom of the internet, banks were probably the only institutions that had the power to move money and impact the regulation and policy surrounding the use of money alongside their respective governments.
But as we entered the 21st century and the digital revolution took over the world along with the internet, we saw the emergence of FinTech companies and NBFCs. While in many countries such organizations might not have the same power or abilities as banks such as lending power, it definitely was a wake-up call for banks to up their game and match the offerings of these companies that individuals and businesses were drawn towards instead of going to a bank.?
Whether it is acquiring new customers, finding new revenue streams, or improving the experience of existing customers, banks have had to adopt many new technology trends to compete with modern financial institutions. This competition is of course good for the end user as it forces these institutions to innovate and constantly provide better services.
Among the many technology trends that have come in the banking sector, some of them have truly changed the way the industry operates. These include:
Stripe rolls out the tap-to-pay feature?
Stripe, the payments, and financial services company has recently launched its tap-to-pay feature for NFC-enabled Android devices, a feature that was already available on iPhones. The feature is now available in beta on supported devices in Singapore, the US, Canada, and the UK.
Other news plus good reads