India goes one (more) step further with RTP

By Isabelle Castro Margaroli

In a bid to target financial exclusion, India has announced their?plans to implement voice-activated and offline digital payments? across their Universal Payments Interface (UPI).

Launched in 2016, the UPI, an infrastructure for digital payments, has experienced supercharged adoption, making India one of the leaders in real-time payments.?

However, to date, adoption has been mainly concentrated within urban areas due to?sparse internet access and lower levels of literacy in rural areas. ?

The plans for UPI’s development could directly target this, enabling “near field communication” tech for phone-to-phone payments and “conversational payments”. The latter will let users use verbal instructions for transactions.?

Sounds simple(ish), but in a country that hosts dozens of languages and access to digital tools is hard to come by, analysts believe its “game-changing” potential could be difficult to achieve.?

Although not impossible.?

On the flip side, the UPI has experienced increased levels of fraud over the last few years.?UPI fraud now accounts for 55% ?of all digital fraud in the country, often as a result of confidence tricks and authorized payments (APP scams) .?

The voice activation may mean a step further toward financial inclusion in a digital framework, but if the fraud angle isn't managed, it could open new users out to a whole set of financial complications.

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