
UPI: India's Unified Payments Interface - zero_kool
https://the-other-side.blog/upi-the-basics/
======
Abishek_Muthian
I tell about UPI to my friends in Western countries, When they tell how easy
and seamless Apple Pay has made their payments, they're often surprised that
such system exists here. One can download GPay or plethora of other apps to
setup UPI to sync with the bank accounts within minutes and conduct
transactions.

With vernacular support/affordable cellular data, these apps have found its
users even among those who have never used a computer in their life to login
to their banking portal or used debit card before to conduct any online
transactions earlier.

 _Now, what 'I' don't like about it_,

Extraordinary dependence on 'Mobile Number' for security, RBI(India's central
bank) requires personal phone number to be synced with the bank account, so
these 'UPI' apps send SMS from the phone at random to 'verify' that it's
actually you i.e. if the phone number matches its you. If you are like me, who
has the phone in aeroplane mode 24*7 or use cellular on-demand be prepared for
transaction failures at best to getting locked out of the UPI apps at worst.

Then there is the question of SMS OTP as the backbone of Indian banking
infrastructure's 2FA security, we know SIM-Jacking attacks are getting
prevalent every passing day, coercing an employee of a Telecom who earns
minimum wage is not that difficult and especially since there is zero 'cyber-
security' awareness among much of the population; attackers just dupe many of
them into giving them the OTP[1].

It's high time banking infrastructure here start supporting hardware tokens or
at least TOTP apps and UPI has to hedge its unique id dependence to email id
as well.

[1][https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/wealth/save/beware-
of-t...](https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/wealth/save/beware-of-
these-6-frauds-while-making-payments-via-upi-amid-
lockdown/articleshow/75671798.cms)

~~~
sorbits
> _I tell about UPI to my friends in Western countries, When they tell how
> easy and seamless Apple Pay has made their payments, they 're often
> surprised that such system exists here […]_

Western countries in your statement is probably mainly USA, as most of Europe
has been using contactless payment via NFC for many years.

Apple Pay is effectively just using the phone’s NFC chip instead of that
embedded in the debit/credit card, although it does bring one advantage:
Because the iPhone has its own authentication system, you’re never asked for
PIN code when paying with your phone, whereas paying with a debit/credit card
will ask for PIN if the amount is above a certain threshold, or if it hasn’t
asked for a long time.

I have been using payment apps in Asia, not India, but Apple Pay is definitely
more seamless (or NFC enabled cards), as these only require you to hold them
near the terminal, whereas a payment app require first being launched, and
then either scanning a QR code and confirming, or bringing up your QR code to
have the cashier scan it.

Don’t get me wrong: I am very much a fan of the concept of UPI, I am
commenting just to clarify that universal payment interface with third party
apps is different than NFC enabled payments, where I think it is really the
latter, that your friends in Western countries are describing as seamless.

~~~
harpratap
Google/Apple pay are still not as seamless as something like Osaifu Keitai
from Japan. Google/Apple are beholden to Visa & Mastercard and the banks
issuing the correct kind of cards. Japan's Osaifu Keitai tech stack + business
model completely gets rid of these old institutions.

One example is Visa Japan has some ongoing fallout with Apple and JR East, so
you cannot use your Visa credit card to top up your Suica transit card with
Apple pay, but it works fine on Android with Google pay. Lot of merchants get
confused between NFC/Apple Pay/Google Pay/Visa Pay and so many spin offs of
something that's essentially just NFC A-B mode of payment.

With Osaifu Keitai you just choose one provider - Passmo, Suica etc and just
top up money in any form you want - cash, credit card, debit card, points etc.
And it just works. No internet, no middlemen and sub millisecond latency which
is very crucial transit payments.

~~~
ZeikJT
Last time I was visiting Japan my friends with Apple phones were able to add
their physical cards to their phones and then top up their suica/pasmo cards
digitally but I had Android and it was impossible.

~~~
rnotaro
It's available on Android since March. ^_^

[https://www.pasmo.co.jp/mp/and/](https://www.pasmo.co.jp/mp/and/)

------
dheerendra73
As a UPI user who is using this from literally day 1 and who is hard core
advertiser of this, here are few important points:

1\. Security: Signup requires phone number validation via SMS and phone number
must be registered with bank. It also requires additional details like debit
card validation. This makes is hard to spoof. After signup your device finger
print is stored with NPCI and this works as 1st factor. An additional PIN is
also required during signup. You can send money only from registered device
and requires fingerprint and pin validation.

2\. Every digital transaction in India triggers SMS, so that provides
additional transparency to user.

3\. All payments are from bank account to bank account and they happen in real
time! Also no transaction fee!

4\. Merchants require no special equipments and they advertise their VPA
usually via QR code in shops so it’s easy for users to pay.

4\. Online payments can be either user triggered or can be requested via
pushing payment request to user app. However user needs to approve the request
with pin.

Point 3 & 4 were the biggest reasons why India adopted it pretty quickly. Also
ofcourse due to Jio boom & cheap chinese smartphones!

~~~
9nGQluzmnq3M
Q: If a phone number has to be registered and validated, why not use that as
the unique ID, instead of creating a separate VPA?

For comparison, in Singapore, the local UPI-like "PayNow" network uses numbers
as IDs, meaning you can easily send money to anybody in the system (these days
virtually everybody) without needing to know their bank. You can also transfer
to any Singaporean company or organization via their Unique Entity Number,
which is an existing company/org ID assigned at formation that includes a
checksum.

[https://abs.org.sg/consumer-banking/pay-now](https://abs.org.sg/consumer-
banking/pay-now)

~~~
pcx
VPA is used for discoverability across UPI clients. Phone numbers can be used
for discoverability among users of a single client. For eg: foobar@icici on
Google Pay & baz@hdfc on PhonePe can transact with each other, but can't use
phone numbers. But +91-1234567890 & +91-9876543210 can discover & transact
only if they are both on either PhonePe or Google Pay or any other client
application. QR Codes were initially client-specific too, but now they are
scannable across apps.

UPI truly is a revolution. I can have a 6Rs chai tea (8 cents) from a road
side tea stall and pay using UPI with zero transaction fees.

~~~
signal11
> UPI truly is a revolution. I can have a 6Rs chai tea (8 cents) from a road
> side tea stall and pay using UPI with zero transaction fees.

The main benefit of UPI is that it works really well for small amounts, e.g.
the INR 6 tea. Such small transcations were traditionally too
small/uneconomical for Visa/Mastercard.

However as the transaction size grows, say you're buying a laptop for INR
50,000 -- that's when the protections Visa/Mastercard build in against fraud
start helping you and UPI's "no transaction fee" value proposition also starts
looking like "no accountability".

Interestingly, India has a home-grown Visa/MC alternative called RuPay, which
also waives transaction fees for small amounts and is a credible alternative
to Visa/MC.

Unfortunately Indian startups have been obsessed with pushing e-wallets (PayTM
et al) or direct electronic cash transfers (UPI) because it benefits them --
as the transaction size goes up it certainly doesn't protect the consumer.

------
filleduchaos
It amazes me how seemingly behind US banking is tech-wise. My home country for
instance has the Nigerian Inter-Bank Settlement System for decades; it's quite
similar to the UPI but primarily led by the central bank (plus participation
is mandatory for all banks/bank-like institutions).

For anyone that's curious, the platform's home page at [https://nibss-
plc.com.ng/](https://nibss-plc.com.ng/) has a nice little statistics summary
of both POS and account-to-account transactions (you might have to scroll past
the fold). There's five-minute and whole day numbers for total transactions
and error rate broken down into types of errors - it's a nice bit of
transparency.

~~~
inopinatus
> It amazes me how seemingly behind US banking is tech-wise.

This is a statement true in other infrastructure domains, from plumbing to
roads to healthcare. It was explained to me that although the US possesses
world-class technology in practically every field, the deployment is mediated
through a fragmented and diverse political economy.

That’s when I properly internalised how the US is federated not merely at the
top level, but through many strata of localised governance, and the practical
consequences thereof.

Couple this to the inertia of regulatory capture by entrenched wealth (which
occurs in all human systems irrespective of political construct) and it’s easy
to accept that US retail banking, which is approaching three centuries of
uptime, will be a very late adopter of mass-market technology.

~~~
riffraff
This sounds reasonable, but I'm not sure it's all the explanation.

The EU is far more fragmented at a government level, but chip&pin cards where
much more common than in the US far earlier.

Likewise, mobile communication was far better in Europe 20 years ago than it
was in the US (all of Europe had GSM while the US was insanely fragmented).

And the EU was able to push the open banking directive with relative ease
while the US still seems to have nothing comparable.

So it seems to me there's something else in play that explains your
observation.

~~~
fastball
The reason for that is because the US was "standardizing" finance before the
EU even existed, and therefore has momentum from _those_ standards that needs
to be overcome in order to adopt _new_ standards.

e.g. having strong anti-fraud/anti-theft practices built around signatures.

~~~
pgeorgi
European countries were also standardizing finance before the EU existed, but
that meant that there already was the infrastructure of banks working together
(in each country) that was then used to establish the EU wide protocols.

In comparison US banking seems rather adversarial in nature and so there are
few interbanking standards which led to the need of a layer on top in the form
of credit card companies to abstract away the differences.

------
lykr0n
I'd love for the US to adopt a standard that is bank agnostic, like ACH, but
allows for near real-time payments from P2P but also person to business
payments.

It's a big problem when Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal control a large part of
money transactions.

~~~
jmole
Visa, Mastercard, and Paypal offer more than transactions though; they have
"buyer protection", "seller protection", etc.

In theory, all you need is institutional trust and KYC, but as soon as you hit
a situation like, "oh shit, someone stole my wallet (/ online identity)", you
realize why the fees are there.

~~~
smart_jackal
>> "oh shit, someone stole my wallet (/ online identity)"

Isn't one supposed to be responsible for their own passwords/security? Does
Microsoft take responsibility if someone steals your windows password or hacks
your computer? No, they will just say its you who didn't install the security
updates. Why should a banking transaction be any different?

~~~
nurettin
Because banking is serious business and windows is not.

------
sandGorgon
It is a super exciting time to be doing fintech in India. Here are the open
APIs.

UPI = Venmo + Paypal

UPI Autopay = open credit card subscriptions pull

PCR = Open FICO+Equifax

NBFC-AA = Open Plaid

Digilocker = Open docusign+dropbox

OCEN = Open Lendingclub

Together, they are called IndiaStack (along with our upcoming health and drone
apis).

~~~
kumarharsh
Plus Aadhaar, eSign, and eKYC

------
zorro58
UPI is a fascinating battle field of tech companies. I had a front seat to
some of the negotiations happening to build platforms on UPI. There was a fear
in India that foreign tech companies would monopolize that platform.

Concurrent with negotiations to build on UPI, there were also leaks and
stories by both sides in the press to bolster or communicate positions. For
example, there was one story where an official said that a tech CEO made a
commitment. The tech CEO did not make that commitment. That company's team had
their own set of meeting notes confirming their position. Other companies were
livid with the tech company for supposedly taking that position. With the
story now published, the tech company could not publicly deny the story or
else they would anger the other side. So they quietly rolled with it.

It is also a credit to PayTM's CEO. Their CEO saw that succeeding with UPI was
a matter of survival. Backed up against a wall, he fought back against his
competitors with everything he had and is winning so far.

Someone needs to write a book on the behind the scenes happenings.

~~~
akritrime
That's so fascinating. If I wanted to know more about this side of Indian
fintech, where should I start?

~~~
captn3m0
Read everything by Arundhati on The Ken. She covers fintech extremely well.

------
pedrocx486
Brazil is doing a similar bank-agnostic system called PIX. Kinda interesting
how in the previous thread where I mentioned it a lot of people were against
it because it was "not competitive" while here I'm seeing (mostly) praise for
UPI.

IMHO, this is how it should be, a bank-agnostic standard set by the central
bank that other services use to connect to the central and with each other.
Competition is good? Yes, but not when it's a complete _mess_.

------
perryizgr8
I love UPI and it has proved to be a boon in this time when I am scared of
touching cash. It's very fast, easy and quite reliable in my case. In
Bangalore, it works literally everywhere. From the smallest shops to big
supermarkets. Many small shopkeepers even discourage me from paying in cash.

But people need to realize one aspect of UPI that it is exactly as unsafe as
cash. Would you send cash to someone over the phone for accepting delivery of
a product later? No. So don't do that with UPI.

Use UPI when it would be appropriate to use cash, when you're standing face to
face with the seller. Just think of it as more convenient cash. Otherwise, it
is ripe for exploitation by thieves.

~~~
blueblisters
> Just think of it as more convenient cash.

Yup exactly. As someone mentioned above, it's a frictionless payments system,
unlike Visa/Mastercard which also offer dispute resolution.

Of course, if you trust the vendor, I don't see why you should implicitly pay
for the protection mechanism of Visa/Mastercard when UPI is literally free.

~~~
captn3m0
> _when UPI is literally free_

So far. Lots of banks are fighting to introduce fees. The actual cost is
getting subsidised so far, but there are no free lunches. Banks can't keep
this up forever.

------
vishnugupta
RBI recently issued a circular inviting companies to build a retail payments
network, in parallel to UPI [1], under New Umbrella Entity (NUE).

Two key aspects of NUE are, it could be a for-profit, and it'll be governed by
India's FDI rules, meaning foreign investments are allowed and could even be
encouraged as FDI rules get relaxed.

Both these are in direct contrast to NPCI's charter which is a not-for-profit
and entirely owned by Indian entities. In fact NPCI is a quasi government
organisation, owned by a combination of RBI and Indian banking association.

Google (through its India subsidiary) has already applied for
building/operating an NUE, and I won't be surprised if Facebook has done it
too.

I just hope that 20 years down the line we won't end up with a fragmented
quagmire with half a dozen payment networks each of which don't talk to anyone
else. UPI solved a huge problem of interoperability and it'll be a shame if
its seamlessness is squandered away.

[1]
[https://www.rbi.org.in/scripts/bs_viewcontent.aspx?Id=3832](https://www.rbi.org.in/scripts/bs_viewcontent.aspx?Id=3832)

~~~
wtmt
> Both these are in direct contrast to NPCI's charter which is a not-for-
> profit and entirely owned by Indian entities.

By Indian entities, if you do include Citibank and HSBC (local arms), then
yes. The promoters are private and public banks.

> In fact NPCI is a quasi government organisation, owned by a combination of
> RBI and Indian banking association.

It's promoted by RBI, but not really owned by it. The ownership lies with the
consortium of private and public banks.

------
throwaway432334
Engineering wise, it's a miracle that UPI works. All of the banks have very
little in the way of consistency checks and proper abstractions. Everything is
superglued together and very brittle. There was clearly little direct
communication between NPCI, the issuing banks, and the users of the apis in
development.

I agree with India's protectionist attitudes that's kept Western companies
from monopolizing the ecosystem though. It works well enough, much to chagrin
of SV tech companies lol.

------
galaxyLogic
It takes like 3 days to pay my Chase credit-card from my Citibank account.
Lots of waste happening in the financial system.

~~~
yokaze
AFAIK, that's not waste, it's intentional. That's three days of that money out
of your books, and on the banks side.

~~~
ckdarby
While this is true a lot of banks would like to do it instantly as it would be
an advantage over others and drive more people to sign up for the feature.

The real problem is most banks backend systems are still old mainframes where
this isn't possible.

Source: I'm a prior developer at multi-billion dollar payment processor
working with many acquirers.

~~~
orf
> The real problem is most banks backend systems are still old mainframes
> where this isn't possible.

The rest of the world manages it. Do they not use mainframes?

~~~
tialaramex
In the UK at least the answer was government fiat.

Faster Payments is the unimaginative name for the rule that allows most UK
bank account holders to move money the same day (typically in reality
instantly) at zero cost to them. The date for Faster Payments becoming
possible was set, and banks are just obliged to provide it. Some were earlier,
most were not.

The banks did not actually implement the underlying backend transfers in time,
but customers don't care. Rick Smith, father to an 18 year old daughter who
seemingly always needs another few hundred quid for something wants to send
Beth £750 right now, and Beth wants to be able to spend that money when she
receives it from her father. Neither of them cares that Rick's and Beth's
banks are running different versions of some 1970s COBOL application or are
struggling to ensure a backend funds transfer matching the Rick-> Beth
transaction happens in a timely fashion.

So the banks just faked the UX. This technically means if Rick's bank fails
after Rick sent the money, but before the backend catches up in a day or two,
Beth's bank (but not Beth or Rick) could lose the value of the transaction
because the underlying money actually didn't go anywhere yet, just the two
account balances were updated. But regulators reasoned that banks being more
likely to freak out and report if they suspect their competitors are
struggling and likely to fail imminently is a _good_ thing so let them take
that risk.

Maybe they have subsequently fixed their backends, maybe they didn't, as an
end user I needn't care so I paid no further attention.

------
Kednicma
Great idea; let's have USPS administer it, like they used to do for money
orders and wire transactions. No sense in replacing Mastercard with Google.

~~~
dodobirdlord
I think this is an excellent suggestion, assuming the post office survives an
ongoing calculated attempt to cripple and privatize it. Routing digital
payment requests to bank addresses is a natural extension of the
responsibility of routing all physical mail to any physical address.

~~~
patmorgan23
I think the Fed is a better place to administer this. It already does checks
and ACH payments.

------
lonesword
As an Indian citizen living in Germany right now, I sorely miss UPI. My
workflow to order food in India - 1) open app and add things to cart 2) Google
Pay (linked to UPI) prompts for my fingerprint and that's it. In Germany, I
mostly end up using SOFORT which involves remembering my account number, pin,
and then using a mobile OTP. There's no "easy" way to transfer money to
friends - everyone either uses paypal or Transferwise, which requires an
additional step to withdraw funds to your bank account. When shopping at brick
and mortar shops, the payment options are either cash or a card. For a country
that enjoys such a high standard of living, Germany has surprisingly
underwhelming digital banking infrastructure.

------
Finster
The big concern I have here is that the address resolution seems similar to
DNS... Which is very bad, IMHO. Are they taking necessary steps to mitigate
ddos and Man in the middle attacks? If they're not, they're seeing themselves
up for major disaster.

~~~
arafsheikh
I don’t know about UPI, but those concerns can be mitigated by not operating
on public networks. The SWIFT payment network for example is private[1] and is
only accessible via dedicated routers.

[1] [https://www.exalog.com/en/swiftnet-network-banking-
communica...](https://www.exalog.com/en/swiftnet-network-banking-
communication)

~~~
closeparen
Relying on perimeter security like this means you are as vulnerable as your
weakest nodes. SWIFT can be and has been hacked via its less sophisticated
participant banks.

------
sseth
UPI is growing at an incredible rate.

One important reason for the growth is the explosive increase in 4G
connectivity in the last 4 years, which has data usage on mobile see a
compound average growth of 93% to become the highest in the world at 11.2 GB
per user / month. The rates are almost laughably cheap, at around 0.20 USD/GB.

COVID has also driven more recent growth because people don't want to handle
cash.

------
jgalt212
There are just so many things that make me fearful of either losing my phone
or having it irreparably damaged. The account recovery process can be a. too
hard or impossible (Hi Gitlab!) or b. too easy (too simple security
questions).

~~~
nine_k
2FA with some rescue codes printed and kept in your wallet / safe box seems
like a reasonably bulletproof setup (hi GitHub!), but not every important site
offers this.

~~~
scoot
Printing them and carrying them in a wallet that could be lost or stolen seems
like asking for trouble.

~~~
nine_k
Unless you're a victim of a targeted attack, and the perpetrators know your
accounts and go to immediately hijack them, it's a non-issue. You just
generate and print new rescue codes, and the old codes become invalid.

------
not2b
I've made five trips to India for business, the most recent was in 2017. The
system that was instituted just before my last trip caused me major problems,
as suddenly two things happened: foreign credit cards were no good for
payments online (I had to get a colleague to buy my Taj Mahal ticket online
and pay him back with cash), and it was suddenly much more difficult for some
people I was trying to pay to accept payments in cash; restaurants and hotels
could still get it done, but for others it was a major problem. I hope they
have these issues straightened out by now.

------
zimbatm
The article looked great until the introduction of the NPCI system. It's
essentially a single point of failure, and the best place to observe all the
transaction of the whole country. It's controlled by the Government so it will
be really tempting to peek into it.

> Imagine the pain that everyone has to go through in reaching a consensus
> when configurations or infrastructures change. It would be chaos.

Welcome to the Internet.

~~~
themacguffinman
So is the Federal Reserve, so is the SEC, so is the IRS, so are all the
financial reporting laws that require transactions to be reported to the US
government for audit and regulation. I fail to see how NPCI is any different.
The solutions won't be any different either: the government has laws
restricting unregulated access to data and developers will implement access
controls to enforce these laws.

The financial system in practically every country is already fully controlled
by a central authority, and for good reason: finance is critical to national
security and financial decisions are inherently political, therefore finance
is controlled by political authorities.

~~~
captn3m0
You are wrong on one very important point: NPCI is a non-government entity. It
is a not for profit corporation that acts as a conglomeration of banks. The
government gets a day in it by 1. owning public sector banks and 2. By
regulating it indirectly as RBI (which is itself quite autonomous).

It is more akin to a not for profit VISA than the Fed Reserve.

~~~
themacguffinman
> NPCI is a non-government entity

Fair correction. However, correct me if I'm wrong, it still plays the role of
a singular national authority blessed by the central bank. I'm skeptical that
its non-government status is an important distinction when it appears to be an
exclusively Indian institution co-established by the RBI. I don't think Visa's
status is quite the same: Visa has actual competitors and operates under many
foreign jurisdictions. I'd say the NPCI is as trustworthy and protected as the
government institutions that bless it.

~~~
captn3m0
Yeah, the VISA comparison isn’t apt either. Maybe if VISA had a higher market
share.

The RBI initiated process to setup a parallel body to NPCI, but that will take
eons in fintech time.

The non-government status is important because the NPCI fought a case (and
won) to keep it out of the ambit of the Right yo Information act. It is an
opaque institution with a government granted monopoly that is also
simultaneously a cartel of sorts.

------
gingerlime
Slightly OT, but what's the simplest way to offer more payment options online
in India? Is there a way to set up UPI as a foreign company?

For context: we're a small B2C bootstrapped company offering online anatomy
learning. We use Stripe and Paypal (via Fastspring), but it seems like it's
far from enough for the local market in India...

~~~
pkphilip
The best option is to tie up with a payment gateway like Razorpay, Instamojo
etc. They allow a variety of payment methods including UPI and also what is
called "Net Banking" \- which is direct transfers from a bank account even
without UPI being used.

They also support a variety of wallets.

Instamojo actually advertises that they support over 100 payment methods.

Some of these payment gateways also allows you a "Pay Later" option which
allows the user to pay via a micro loan that they take from the gateway. This
is apart from the credit card, debit card options.

Razorpay: [https://razorpay.com/payment-
gateway/](https://razorpay.com/payment-gateway/)

Instamojo: [https://www.instamojo.com/](https://www.instamojo.com/)

~~~
captn3m0
Razorpay only supports merchants registered in India.

Disclaimer: I work at Razorpay.

~~~
pkphilip
True. They will need some sort of an Indian subsidiary or go through an Indian
registered company to allow Razorpay or Instamojo payments

~~~
gingerlime
Thank you. I’m not sure that’s an option for us unfortunately. Unless you know
of some stripe atlas equivalent service for setting up a company in India?

~~~
pkphilip
Unfortunately I am not sure if there are other ways of doing this. You may
want to check with one of the primary backend services of the payment gateways
- fsstech.com

------
rootkea
The best feature of UPI for me is that it provides USSD code (*99#) to
interact with the UPI. Since I only use FLOSS apps (via f-droid.org) on my
LineageOS I use UPI without installing any UPI app (which all are proprietary
e.g. PayTm, Gpay etc.).

------
known
Remembering Bank A/c number + IFSC is safe/better

------
quarantine
This looks like a Bancontact/SEPA combination.

------
atemerev
As if what we need is even more surveillance capitalism...

~~~
PaulDavisThe1st
Every electronic transaction you're involved with is already surveiled, so
it's hard to see how that would change.

But how about NOT having to pay banks for instantaneous funds transfers to any
3rd party? And how about actually have instantaneous funds transfer to any 3rd
party (something which does not exist in the US banking system)

Same surveillance, lower costs, faster payments.

~~~
atemerev
Bitcoin already works for cheap international transfers.

And no, my bank won’t give any details about my account and its transactions
(unless I do something really horrible), even to the national tax authorities
(I live in Switzerland, where bank secrecy is still a thing, at least for the
residents/citizens).

~~~
vinay427
This is generally true in Switzerland as you stated (with those exceptions for
more serious issues) for residents, as Swiss citizenship is irrelevant. Anyone
resident in any of a host of countries with which Switzerland has signed
agreements can have their bank details shared with the country of residence.

I suspect a fair amount of other countries have this discrepancy as well.
Based on a brief online search it seems like the data on US checking/savings
accounts of US residents are not shared with the IRS, for instance, unless a
summons (which can be contested) is approved. I'm not sure what the difference
is in practice.

------
varbhat
UPI is not nice.

1) UPI is unreliable. Based on my experience, it doesn't work many times per
day. I once needed to beg my friend to pay for me after realizing that it
didn't work when i purchased something in shop but had no money(only upi
account)

2) It is closed source. UPI forces every App that uses UPI to use it's closed
source code.

3) I find Bank transfer like IMPS/NEFT more reliable than UPI.

4) One advantage of UPI is it's id which led to discovery of account (through
qr code) . This is also the reason it got adopted by people.

~~~
akritrime
NEFT is not real time like IMPS (on which UPI is built). I don't think it is
UPI that is unreliable, it is your bank. I have been using UPI on two
accounts, SBI one is the one I face some problem from time to time. I agree
with the closed source point, though.

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captn3m0
NEFT now runs on 30 minute batches, and it is 24x7x365. RBI changed it
December 2019.

It’s still not real time, but NPCI doesn’t see your transactions :)

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akritrime
Oh that's so convenient, I thought NEFT was still limited to working hours
only. I wonder how the technology underneath changed to enable this.

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captn3m0
> _wonder how the technology underneath changed_

80% of fintech is excel sheets getting sent from one system to the other. A
lot of these were baby-sit earlier, and RBI changed this over a year or so.
They asked for banks to make sure the processes were automated first, then
lots of test-runs.

I think another important reason was that the morning rush (build-up of
pending transfers) was causing issues and chokepoints. Smaller window-sizes
helped fix that.

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akritrime
By babysit, do you mean someone used to go thru the sheets and update all the
accounting stuff? I know its a bit idiotic question but I won't be really
surprised if that's how it was.

