Freecharge to usher in Axis Bank integration to UPI

UPI is yet to become operational, but we are ready with our application and will have a tie-up with Freecharge right from the start for the UPI-based payments, its head of cards and payments, Sangram Singh said, business-standard.com reports.

He said according to the UPIs architecture, the banks application, called Axis Pay App, can be used by any other banks customer. Stating that the key difference between the soon-to-be-introduced UPI and the existing mobile banking is simplicity, Singh said one can do banking transactions using only a single Virtual Payment Address (VPA), the source cites.

He said while transferring money to an account, the sender will not be forced to feed the slew of details like the account number and banks IFSC Code, but can transact using only the VPA. When asked about the business benefit for Axis Bank for facilitating other bank customers transactions, he said rather than individual gains, lenders have to first increase the size of the electronics payments first, which accounted for only up to seven per cent of payment transactions.

Singh said he expects the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) to go live with the UPI in the near future and Axis Bank will be among the over dozen banks which will go live on it as part of the first phase of the launch. UPI is a channel that powers multiple bank accounts into a single mobile application (of any bank) of a participating bank, merging several banking features like fund routing and merchant payments into one hood. It was launched by the Reserve Bank of India Governor Raghuram Rajan along with the NPCI advisor Nandan Nilekani in April this year.