The story was first published on 12 April 2016.
India moved a step closer towards becoming a cashless economy with the launch of National Payments Corporation of India’s (NPCI’s) Unified Payment Interface (UPI) on Monday.
The NPCI operates the Rupay payments infrastructure that – like Visa and MasterCard – allows different banks to interconnect and transfer funds. The UPI can be thought of as a digital framework to do the same – the idea being that all financial instruments can be given a unique identity on the UPI, which can then be used to quickly and easily carry out online payments.
With UPI, will we finally see the tide turn away from cash towards digital money? There are many reasons to hope for this, as digital systems can be used to reduce the opacity of cash, and to build a person’s financial history, which will be an important tool for financial inclusion.