Can NPCI fix the tangled mess of credit on UPI?

Fintech startups have bent the rules and found loopholes to enable UPI loans or credit lines. NPCI has come down hard on them.

The Unified Payments Interface, or UPI, run by the National Payments Corporation of India, is widely hailed as one of the biggest innovations in public financial infrastructure in the world. For good reason—NPCI’s instant bank-to-bank transfer system is the most popular payment method in the country, with more than 3.2 billion transactions in the month of July this year.

One of the promises of “UPI 2.0”, launched with much fanfare three years ago in August 2018, was a way to add credit as a capability on UPI. Lending lies at the core of most fintech business models and UPI was …

Author

Advait Palepu

Advait is a financial journalist and a former writer at The Morning Context. Here, he wrote on India’s banks, the wider financial services industry and the fintech ecosystem. He has previously worked with the Economic and Political Weekly, Business Standard, BloombergQuint and MediaNama, where he covered everything from the Reserve Bank of India to fintech policy.

Writer

advait@mailtmc.com

Mumbai