Bengaluru: Emphasising its focus on making immediate payment solutions (IMPS) more useful and easier, National Payment Corporations of India, the umbrella organisation for all retail payment systems in the country announced its Unified Payment Interface Hackathon, inviting startups and developers with solutions in online payment services.
To take IMPS to the next level, NPCI MD A.P. Hota said, UPI would focus on making collections easier for merchants, replacing IFSC codes required during account to account transfer, by virtual addresses and leveraging on the smart phone revolution to benefit money transactions made online.
UPI is the next generation payment system and it has the potential to revolutionise retail payments, he said at the launch. “A key feature of UPI is that it would provide interoperable and instant payments driven over the mobile platform,” he said.
Over 1000 participants from 220 institutions have signed up for the Hackathon to develop solutions for FinTech sector. By mid March, NPCI will identify most promising solutions and discuss on their applications, said Mr. Hota.
The Hackathon will be conducted in multiple tracks primarily for two categories — software based problem solving – online or onsite event version and workshop format to solve a real life problem that is plaguing the industry.
The event was launched by NPCI Adviser Nandan Nilekani, Balachandran M., and iSPIRT co-founder Sharad Sharma.
“UPI is going to leapfrog on online payments. This is a great starting point and in the next one year, we will see very interesting use cases that will make an impact on people’s payment habits” said Mr Nilekani.
NPCI Chairman Balachandran M. said the RuPay version of credit cards will be rolled either in June or July this year. He also said that NPCI earlier had an authorised paid-up capital of '100 crore, shared by ten banks, has gone up to '137 crore, held by 56 different banks and 46 additional shareholding entities.
