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CoverStory

While mobile wallets were designed for smart phones, only ment has eliminated merchant discount rates and issued
17 percent of Indians owned smart phones at the time, so QR codes to all merchants for UPI acceptance. This is in-
the government devised a payment app that worked with centivizing merchants of all sizes to accept UPI payments,
ordinary flip phones. This created the potential to connect ACI stated.
400 million users in distant rural areas to real-time pay-
ment rails, according to the International Monetary Fund. "With a burgeoning cashless society, the old ways are in-
creasingly forgotten by the country's hundreds of millions
Also in 2016 the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), a re- of young people," the IMF said.
al-time, mobile-enabled system was launched by the Na-
tional Payment Corporation of India, a nonprofit entity UPI's ubiquitous reach has made it the first choice for In-
formed by the Reserve Bank of India (the country's central dian consumers and businesses, including traveling con-
bank) and the Indian Banks' Association. sumers. Payments using UPI can be made in Malaysia,
Indonesia, UAE and France, further demonstrating how
Today, RBI fosters a varied ecosystem of payment net- Asian economies are pushing the envelope of real-time
works, including a credit-debit card system, a large cash- payments.
machine network, and a payment system using the na-
tional identity program to bring banking to underserved "Real-time payments—and especially cross-border pay-
areas, IMF researchers wrote in a 2022 country focus titled ments—are the future," said Debbie Guerra, chief product
How India's central bank helped spur a digital payments boom. officer at ACI. "They remove payment friction, provide
greater liquidity in the financial system, and ultimately
NPCI CEO Dilip Asbe predicted that growth in terms of drive economic growth and financial inclusion."
individual digital payment users would triple between
2022 and 2027 to total 750 million, and that merchant us- Patti Murphy, self-described payments maven of the fourth estate, is
ers could double to 100 million.
senior editor at the Green Sheet. She also co-hosts the Merchant Sales
Merchant adoption and uptake are crucial for real-time Podcast, and is president of ProScribes Ink.
payments growth. To spur adoption, the Indian govern-

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