The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), the umbrella organisation for all retail payment systems in the country, has announced that its Unified Payments Interface (UPI) is set to go live with customers from 21 banks.

The soft-launch of the API was announced back in April and for the past few months it has been piloted, primarily with employee-customers, in order to ensure that any technical glitches were ironed out prior to launch.

After assessing the success of the pilot run, the Reserve Bank of India has given its final approval for a public launch of the product. NPCI decided that only the banks with 1,000 pilot customers, 5,000 transactions and a success rate of around 80 per cent would be permitted to go live.

A total of 19 banks are going live with UPI and will provide UPI-enabled mobile apps on the Google Play store. These FIs are: Andhra Bank, Axis Bank, Bank of Maharashtra, Bhartiya Mahila Bank, Canara Bank, Catholic Syrian Bank, DCB Bank, Federal Bank, ICICI Bank, TJSB Sahakari Bank, Oriental Bank of Commerce, Karnataka Bank, UCO Bank, Union Bank of India, United Bank of India, Punjab National Bank, South Indian Bank, Vijaya Bank and YES Bank.

The other two banks, IDBI Bank and RBL Bank, are onboard as issuers. This will allow their customers to download any UPI-enabled apps, which they can then link to their account.

A P Hota, managing director and CEO of NPCI, said: “This is a success of enormous significance. Real-time sending and receiving of money through a mobile application at such a scale on an interoperable basis had not been attempted anywhere else in the world. Now the UPI app will be made available on Google Play Store by banks.”

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