The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) yesterday launched the ambitious Unified Payments Interface (UPI), a payments architecture which will allow users to transfer money across different banks with the use of a single identification and password.

So far, there are 29 banks which have signed on to the platform and many more wallet services and non-bank institutions are yet to integrate their services to the UPI. Here are some of the reactions for the new payments interface:

Naveen Surya, chairman of Payment Council of India and MD of ItzCash

We are very excited and thrilled with the possibilities of envisioning a simplified and frictionless payments infrastructure with the launch of UPI. All our non-bank members await directions from RBI and NPCI to get ready access and we can surely deliver high digital payments growth as in case of IMPS transactions. Within a period of a 2 years our non-bank members have contributed for more than 40% of all the NPCI transactions within the system.

Abhijit Bose, co-founder and CEO of Ezetap

Ezetap’s vision is to enable universal payment acceptance for all merchants who are using, or will adopt, mobile applications as their point of sale. Our 100,000+ merchant acceptance points are already using Smartphones or PC’s to interact with their customers, and we will use that platform to jumpstart UPI acceptance. We are delighted to work with NPCI and our Partner Banks to bring digital payments via UPI to every corner of India, rapidly.

Ezetap also said that it would be integrating the UPI to its Merchant Universal Payment Acceptance Service. Through this, more than 100,000 merchants will be able to process payments through the UPI. The UPI payment option will appear seamlessly within the same app, allowing Ezetap enabled merchants and enterprises to collect UPI based payments from their customers across all use cases – from in-store payments, to deliveries, and field collections.

Ritesh Pai, senior president and head of digital banking at YES Bank

UPI is expected to transform into a de-facto payments mechanism in the near future. UPI’s open API architecture allows Banks to provide transactional payments services to even Non-Account holders. We are proud to partner with NPCI on this payment system which is aligned with YES BANK’s philosophy to enable higher percentage of digital/mobile payments and thus work towards reduction of cash from the country.

YES Bank is part of a select group of Banks and Financial Institutions invited by NPCI to take part in the launch of UPI. In the coming months, the bank will look at rolling out some UPI services including merchant integrated In-app payments, cab payments for taxi aggregator apps, partnership led model for granular merchant acquisition without the need for physical POS or MPOS, P2P(Peer to Peer) funds transfer, Chat and Pay option with messenger Apps.

Nitin Misra, Vice President at Paytm

For Paytm wallet, it’s a more cost effective method of adding funds compared to other payment instruments. UPI will bring more bank customers who don’t transact online to transact online. This will expand the universe of Paytm customers across it’s products. These customers will not only transact using Paytm wallet across thousands of online & offline merchants for payments but also shop for digital & physical goods on Paytm marketplace. Post launch of payment bank, we will also drive creation of UPI through our app so that all Paytm customers (currently 125m) can have their own virtual addresses with @paytm alias. This will allow Paytm customers to make payments anywhere where Paytm is currently not accepted. Currently most small & medium offline merchants don’t accept electronic payments due to PoS machines costs/rentals, need for separate connectivity for these machines, bank’s KYC norms that won’t allow these merchants to accept payments via PoS machines & high TDRs/fees. Paytm has been aggressively driving digital payments in offline/physical world where anyone can start accepting payments using only their mobile & their Paytm app. UPI will further strengthen this push as any merchants will also be able to accept the payment from any customer using UPI.

Got a view on how the Unified Payments Interface works or how it could change payments? Email us here. Let us know what you think