UPI vs The World & Opportunities
UPI grew from $928M in FY17 to $117B in FY19. India has UPI - What about the world?
IMPS, the backbone of UPI, was the only 5 stars instant payment method in the World - FIS, 2017.
Just a quick recap from our previous post:
Unified Payments Interface (UPI) is an instant real-time payment system developed by the National Payments Corporation of India and regulated by the Reserve Bank of India and works by instantly transferring funds between two bank accounts on a mobile platform. As of June 2020, there are 155 banks live on UPI with a monthly volume of 1.3 billion transactions and value of ₹261835 crores (US$34.7 billion) with an average transaction value of ₹1,958.
Cool Graphic:
Some Global Alternatives
Global E-Wallets by transaction volume & regions served - 2019. Source
Swish
Swish was launched in 2012 by six large Swedish banks, in cooperation with Bankgirot(a clearing system owned by Swedish banks) and the Central Bank of Sweden. Sweden is also regarded as the poster child of cashless countries and is expected to become the world’s first cashless society by March 2023. As of June 2020, Swish recorded 54 million transactions worth nearly KR 28 billion (US$3 billion) with an average transaction value of KR 600. More stats here.
Available in Sweden 🇸🇪
Vipps
Vipps is a Norwegian mobile payment application designed for smartphones developed by DNB, now managed by DNB and 18 other financial institutions together. It was launched in 2015.
Kids can use it too.
Available in Norway 🇳🇴
MobilePay
Launched in 2013, MobilePay is . 9 out of 10 smartphones in Denmark have the MobilePay app. They clocked over 330M transactions in 2019 by collaborating with over 60 banking institutions. MobilePay has more popularity than apps like Facebook in Denmark.
Available in Denmark 🇵🇱 & Finland 🇫🇮
Blik
BLIK is a mobile payment system and scheme, one of the first on the European market, with a unique model of co-operation between banks, payment acquirers, and merchants all supported by innovative information technology, architecture, and design. Built on a partnership of Poland’s six largest banks, the payment scheme allows for a single, integrated platform across all mobile devices.
Available in Poland 🇩🇰
Interac e-Transfer
Founded in 2018, e-Transfer allows customers to send money to anyone with an e-mail address and a bank account in Canada. Prior to February 2018, this was an Interac-branded service operated by Acxsys Corporation. In 2018, the service had 15.2 MAUs with 371.4M transactions transferring about $132B at an average of $357 per transaction.
Available in Canada 🇨🇦
Zelle Pay
Founded in 2017, Zelle Pay is a digital payments network owned by Early Warning Services, a private financial services company owned by the banks like the Bank of America, BB&T, Capital One, JPMorgan Chase, PNC Bank, U.S. Bank, and Wells Fargo. USD$187 billion in payments processed on 743 million transactions in 2019 at a growth of 57% and 72% y-o-y, respectively.
Zelle recorded $133B worth of transactions in the first half of 2020 due to the pandemic. More here
Available in the United States 🇺🇸
These were just a handful of instant payment services available across the globe.
A lot more ->
Global E-wallets along with their Functionalities Source
USP of UPI: UPI has opened itself up to nonbanks, allowing technology companies to build consumer apps offering payment features. Nonbanks, however, need to team up with banks to offer payment products. Whereas, all other platforms from different countries are pretty closed. And hence, the world’s most advanced payments system...
What can we build on UPI & Future Expectations
With constant UPI 2.0 rollouts by NPCI teams, an enormous number of opportunities have opened up in recent times
What if a UPI user could pay to a Swish user directly? If not UPI, can the European Mobile Payment Systems Association allow member platform to do cross-transactions?
An alternate instant credit instrument for payments - Credit UPI ID. Similar to a credit card, you get a credit limit based on your CIBIL, UPI transactions, etc, and use the UPI ID to transact anywhere. Instead of your Savings account, the UPI ID would link to your Overdraft account. Since credit, one could offer stuff like EMIs too. LazyPay got a similar feature
UPI Contact-less payments. Touch to pay - similar to Apple/Samsung Pay. Or "Near sound/microphone" similar to the system in Shuttl’s onboarding
Auto-pay using UPI. Replaces bank mandates and credit card auto-debits - UPI 2.0 recently released mandates for Auto-Pay(Latest!). But someone who could do it for P2P the transaction flows, something like e-Cheques.
UPI based reward system
UPI ATM Withdrawals. Replace the banking apps with "cardless-withdrawals" and deprecate the use of Debit cards.
Latest!
UPI releases Auto-Pay for recurring payments like bill payments, recharges, subscriptions, SIPs, etc up to ₹2000.
Read More about UPI’s Auto-Pay here
References/Good Reads
Payment Methods Report 2019 by the European Payment Council. Report
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