India’s homegrown mobile operating system Indus OS has integrated the United Payments Interface (UPI) interface on its platform, making it the first smartphone operating system to do so. With this integration, 8 million Indus OS users will be able to access the UPI platform on their phones without having to download any external app.
Indus OS has partnered with Yes Bank for this purpose. Incidentally, Yes Bank was also the chosen partner for PhonePe, the Flipkart-owned digital payments platform that launched last year. Consumers can use the UPI platform directly on the SMS/messaging and Dialler interface and even on third-party apps, Indus OS said in a statement. A one-tap interface built within the Indus keyboard will allow users to transfer money by using the rupee symbol across all apps. The OS level AI will also be able to sense the user’s intent to make a payment, and it will contextually suggest payments through UPI directly in the messaging applications. Going ahead, it would be integrated with Aadhaar as well, thus making transactions highly secure. ALSO READ: Digital India: Aadhaar-based Digi Pay app now used by 22,000 village entrepreneurs
Indus OS hopes that UPI transactions will go significantly due to this one-click interface. ”This year, one of our focus areas is to empower the ecosystem with OS-integrated innovations that allow for mass applicability of initiatives launched under the ‘Digital India’ program. Our partnership with Yes Bank, which has already created a success with its existing UPI framework, aims to further drive up the existing growth rate of UPI-based transactions,” said Rakesh Deshmukh, Co-founder and CEO of Indus OS.
UPI transactions crossed the 10-million mark in June, according to data released by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) — creator of the platform. “The transaction volume has risen to 10 million in just 11 months from less than one million in August 2016. UPI volume during last three months were 7.20 million, 9.36 million and 10.35 million in April, May and June 2017 respectively,” the NPCI statement said. And transactions on UPI have received a fillip owing to increasing co-operation from member banks, merchants and consumers.
Yes Bank has been at the forefront of furthering UPI’s cause. It was the first bank in India to actively partner with merchants and is currently responsible for close to 35 percent of all UPI transactions in the country. There are over 10,000 online and offline merchants on Yes Bank’s UPI payments solutions. ALSO READ: UPI now available offline via USSD-based mobile banking; here’s how it works
“As a leader in the UPI ecosystem, we are very excited to partner with Indus OS, the only operating system made for the Indian masses, to make the whole UPI experience more contextual. Integrating UPI into the mobile OS will help in creating multiple use cases for payments and spur the adoption of UPI in our country,” said Ritesh Pai, Chief Digital Officer, Yes Bank.
[“Source-bgr”]