Soon, transfer money using your mobile number or Aadhaar

Soon, you would be able to transfer money using your mobile number or email ID. To facilitate easy funds transfer, the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) is working on a new platform called National financial mapper which will enable money transfers using mobile number, Aadhaar number or email ID of the recipient.

The platform will have security layers built into it to prevent misuse and ensure that the money goes to the intended person.

By seeking to build the mapper, the Corporation, which is the umbrella institution for all retail payments in the country, is trying to find a solution to the existing problem of having to remember multiple bank account numbers and bank details for making funds transfer.

The national financial mapper, comprising database of mobile numbers, Aadhaar numbers, and email IDs of bank customers, is a part of NPCI’s move to develop unified payments interface infrastructure. Abhaya Prasad Hota, Managing Director & CEO, NPCI, told BusinessLine that the Corporation will maintain a secure database of bank customers’ mobile number, Aadhaar number and email ID. This will also eliminate errors arising out of punching in incorrect bank account number and the bank details.

“At the backend, when the transaction comes through our national financial switch, we will translate the funds transfer instruction to the right bank and send money to the right person,” explained Hota.

NPCI is also working on developing a low-cost device for iris verification to authenticate transactions. Nandan Nilekani, Co-founder of Infosys Ltd and former Chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India, has been roped in by the NPCI as Adviser (Innovations and Public Policy) to help develop the UPI infrastructure.

“Iris verification is a highly reliable authentication process. But, the challenge is that low-cost devices to capture the iris are not available. So, work is on in association with Nandan Nilekani,” said Hota.

On the money transfer front, the mobile IMPS (Immediate Payment Service) will be taken to a new level via the UPI infrastructure, said the NPCI chief. The UPI infrastructure will facilitate a single click two factor authentication, making online transactions faster and simpler.

Currently, for online transactions on secure channels, bank customers need to key in their PIN (personal identification number) and OTP (one-time password).

“We want to eliminate the OTP kind of thing and make it an automated procedure. Work is on for this,” said Hota.

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