Reliance Jio has been working with NPCI (National Payment Corporation of India) to bring a UPI-based payment system for its JioPhone users. India’s leading telco has now started testing the JioPay app on its 4G-enabled feature phones.
As per this report from BGR, the company is testing the application on 1000 odd JioPhone users as a part of a public trial, ahead of the wider rollout. While this trial started on August 15, Jio has been reportedly working on this for over a year.
The feature, reportedly, only works on the original JioPhone and uses the built-in NFC chip to facilitate tap and pay for contact-less payments to the terminals that use an NFC enabled POS. As per the report, the JioPay app on these 4G-enabled feature phones will offer all the regular features like Add Bank, Scan and Pay, Pay through VPA, Transaction History.
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Apart from working closely with NPCI to ensure that the UPI-based payment system works on the KAI OS-powered smartphones, Jio has already collaborated with several banks including - Axis, ICICI, HDFC, Standard Chartered, IndusInd, SBI, Kotak, YesBank, RBL Bank and is said to have got both Debit and Credit cards to work on JioPay for JioPhone.
Apart from making payments to the merchants over the counters, the JioPhone users will also be able to perform other tasks like recharge their phones, transfer payments to their contacts, receive payments and check their account balance.
As per a Counterpoint report, Reliance Jio has over 100 million JioPhone users in the country. While this number includes all the variants of JioPhone, however, even if a fraction of this user base adopts digital payments it could be a major win for Modi Government’s Digital India campaign.
TechRadar has reached out to Jio representatives to get official details around the wider rollout, we will update this space once we get a response.
