UPI 2.0 Likely to be Released this Week

United Payment Interface (UPI), the backbone of several payments app including Google Tez, PhonePe, BHIM, Paytm Bhim Pay etc., is likely to be updated this week by the National Payments Corporation of India(NPCI) which maintains the UPI network.

The new improved version of UPI dubbed UPI 2.0 is reported to include new features like doubling of transaction limits to Rs 2 lakh, support to pay from overdraft account and will be heavily focused on improving Person-to-Merchant (P2M) transactions and it also includes the Invoicing feature which allows the merchants to send invoices to users upon receiving payments.

One more exciting feature that the merchants can block a certain amount in a customer’s account as security and debit it at a future date without additional authentication, and it will be useful for booking hotel rooms, travel tickets.

However, E-Wallets integration and Standing instruction is not part of this revision as they are not yet ready and might be available in the future. Bio-metric Aadhar based payments featured is withdrawn from this update due to privacy concerns.

This revision comes at the time when the UPI transactions in India are touching new heights with over 25 crore transactions in June, an increase of 30 per cent over 19 crores in May.

The four major players PayTM( 38% ), Google Tez ( 22% ), PhonePe ( 19% ) and NPCI's BHIM ( 7%) account for 83 per cent of the total transactions which saw a 22% rise in the value of transactions in June from ₹ 33,288crorese in March 2018.