Keeping in mind the inclination of the customers towards the use of digital wallets, the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) has officially announced UPI Lite. The new functionality is going to be, as the name suggests, a lighter version of the Unified Payments Interface (UPI).
It is being said that UPI Lite will work similar to MobiKwik, PayTM, etc. In the beginning, users will be allowed to process transactions up to Rs 200. In addition, UPI Lite will also include features like storing money in wallets, small-value transactions in offline mode, and a few more things.
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The introduction of UPI Lite came just after the launch of the 123Pay UPI service by NPCI. The 123Pay service allows UPI payments from more than 40 million feature phones which is no doubt a huge number.
As claimed by NPCI, the entity is looking forward to achieving around billion transactions a day in the upcoming three to five years. Previous stats quoted by NPCI suggest that UPI witnessed 4.52 billion transactions in the month of February that possessed a value of Rs 8,26,843 crore.
Do we really need UPI Lite?
To get an accurate answer to the above question first you need to understand UPI Lite in simple terms. So, UPI Lite is an on-device wallet feature that will let you make small-scale transactions without any internet. These transactions will be made via the money stored in your UPI wallet.
Now, as we all know, no other digital wallet application is offering offline payment support at this point in time which becomes a major complication when you rely on digital payments and are in a low network area.
The introduction of UPI Lite will solve that problem to a great extent. Furthermore, it will also increase the usability of digital payment methods amongst a larger segment.
When will we see a stable version of UPI Lite?
Considering what NPCI has announced, UPI Lite will be first rolled out as a pilot project in partnership with various banks and application providers. Once the testing is done, the service will be ready for a commercial launch.
The exact date of launch has not been confirmed yet by NPCI. Speculations are that the service will be released by the second quarter of 2022.
Working and key features of UPI Lite
The complete functionality of UPI Lite is still in the curtains and will remain like this until the commercial launch. Nonetheless, the pilot version of UPI Lite will allow the users to keep Rs 2,000 at max in their wallets.
Apart from that, the functionality will be partially offline at the beginning. For example, the money will be debited offline from the UPI Lite wallet but credit will happen online. NPCI also said that the users will not be supposed to put UPI PIN every time while making a payment.
Not only this, but NPCI has also said that the UPI applications will utilize the funds stored in the UPI Lite wallet for every transaction less than or equal to Rs 200. However, users will be allowed to disable this feature via the designated application anytime.
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