UPI Lite adoption rate to rise gradually: Axis Bank’s Moghe

The adoption rate of UPI Lite transactions will likely take some time to pick up as users must give consent for usage, but once more people are aware about the ease of using the feature, adoption rates could rise rapidly, Sanjeev Moghe, Axis Bank president and head of cards and payments, told FE on Monday.

“It (UPI Lite) is very easy once people get used to this transaction, and it is fairly safe because overall you can move only `2,000 to a wallet at a time and each transaction cannot be more than `200. Lots of transactions currently on UPI are below this ticket size so that way this is a fairly wide use case, and transaction becomes much easier,” Moghe said.

Axis Bank on Friday launched UPI Lite feature for its customers. The feature enables users to make small ticket payment of up to `200 per transaction, without entering UPI pin. A customer can transfer up to `2,000 to their UPI Lite wallet at a time. RBI governor Shaktikanta Das had launched UPI Lite in September last year.

Also Read

Purpose of Rs 2000 notes fulfilled, was to quickly replenish old Rs 500, Rs 1000 notes, says RBI Guv Das

Double-digit rise in top banks’ loans

DBS sees annual profit to exceed S$10 billion in medium term

Provide shade and water to those exchanging or depositing Rs 2,000 notes: RBI to banks 

“Conceptually, earlier, for every `10-20 transaction we were doing, there was a debit in the bank account. This now will go out to the wallet (UPI Lite wallet) and bank account statement gets clutter free and the transaction is very easy for customer, it does not have to be backed up by pin…,” he said.

Moghe said that sometimes the core banking systems are overloaded and on an ecosystem level there could be banks which could be down at certain times. However, as UPI Lite transactions don’t hit banks’ core finacle system, it automatically reduces load significantly. The UPI ecosystem recorded 8.3 billion transactions worth `13 trillion in January 2023.

“The idea, therefore, is that technical decline rate will be much better in UPI Lite transactions,” the official said. Failure of UPI payments in India are of two types, technical decline and business decline. Technical decline occurs due to failure in banks’ systems or NPCI servers, whereas business decline occur due to user mistakes, like entering a wrong pin.

Further, Moghe said that Axis Bank is also planning to link RuPay Credit Cards with UPI in the next few days. Currently, five banks have linked RuPay Credit Card on UPI wallets – Punjab National Bank, Union Bank of India, Indian Bank, HDFC Bank and Canara Bank.

Moghe also said that Axis Bank is separately working on introducing CBDC payment feature for its customers but did not share a timeline for the launch. CBDC or e-rupee refers to central bank digital currency.