Comments
Indian banks’, which have not adopted the Unified Payment Interface (UPI) yet, may find it difficult to provide their customers this latest payment solution going forward.
National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), which launched UPI payment system last year, is being extra cautious to go live with smaller banks after the banking industry witnessed a fraud of Rs 25 crore at Bank of Maharashtra (BoM) on February 22.
A P Hota, Managing Director of NPCI told reporters today that the umbrella body for retail payments’ would not allow banks to join UPI unless they have a thorough reconciliation process or have got audited by the best of auditors.
"So far about 44 leading banks are on UPI and getting the 45th bank will be a tougher job because we will be very circumspect," Hota said adding that NPCI has been learning a lot from the recent financial frauds, especially the BoM episode, and will implement stringent rules for the banks besides working towards making UPI more secure to use.
Admitting that the BoM fraud occurred due to a bug in its UPI application, Hota said that NPCI is investing heavily on cyber security and making the UPI more secure. The corporation spends about Rs 50 crore annually on cyber security.
He added that corrective steps have been taken for the recovery of the money lost due to the fraud, which occurred after BoM had procured a Unified Payment Interface (UPI) solution from a vendor called InfrasoftTech, which already had a bug. This resulted in about 50-60 people figuring out the loophole in the system and siphoning off the money into their own accounts.
Hota was speaking at an event where NPCI tied up with Reliance Retail to launch its digital payments solutions --UPI and BHIM across all retail stores in Mumbai. There are about 200 Reliance stores (across all formats) in Mumbai. The QR code based digital payment solutions will be rolled out across the country soon and will be extended to other retailers. NPCI is already talking to Big Bazaar. The technology support and POS is being provided by Innoviti Solutions.
NPCI is also seeking to nearly treble the number of point of sale (POS) machines at merchant outlets to 5.5 million over the next six months from 2.4 million at present. The new POS machines will be Aadhar enabled and the old ones will be upgraded soon, Hota added.
Comments
COMMENT NOW
Comments
Comments have to be in English, and in full sentences. They cannot be abusive or personal. Please abide by our community guidelines for posting your comments.
We have migrated to a new commenting platform. If you are already a registered user of TheHindu Businessline and logged in, you may continue to engage with our articles. If you do not have an account please register and login to post comments. Users can access their older comments by logging into their accounts on Vuukle.