India’s Unified Payments Interface, or UPI, is all set to undergo a major overhaul. From June 16, the technology supporting UPI transactions is getting a big upgrade, the benefit of which will include transaction speed boosts and faster payment reversals.
The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) has rolled out a series of enhancements designed to boost UPI’s speed by up to 66 per cent and improve the overall system efficiency. The upgrade, other than boosting transaction speeds, is also taking care of system efficiency and reliability, thus ensuring fewer payment processing errors than before. The benefits will be applicable to all UPI service providers like Google Pay, PhonePe, Paytm UPI, Bhim, WhatsApp UPI and more.
This critical upgrade comes amidst a surge in UPI adoption, with millions of transactions processed daily. The focus of these changes is solely on reducing delays and bolstering reliability for all stakeholders involved, including individual users to major payment platforms and banks.
The NPCI in an earlier circular listed plans to halve the response time for various UPI-related Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). The APIs are the backbone of the UPI ecosystem, governing crucial functions such as payment execution, status checks, and more. The Request Pay/ Response Pay time has been cut down to 15 seconds from 30 seconds and the Transaction Reversal time is now down to 10 seconds. Both ‘check transaction status’ and address validation also take 10 seconds.
The improved response times are anticipated to bring substantial benefits for remitter banks, beneficiary banks and a wide array of Payment Service Providers (PSPs), including popular platforms like Google Pay, PhonePe and Paytm.
