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A digital payments revolution in India

 1 year ago
source link: https://www.economist.com/special-report/2023/05/15/a-digital-payments-revolution-in-india
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Special report | Emerging markets

A digital payments revolution in India

How emerging economies from India to Brazil built alternative payments models

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May 15th 2023

Take a walk on Mumbai’s Juhu beach and little has changed in five years—except for the QR codes adorning every food stall. Go to São Paulo in Brazil, Beijing in China, or many other cities across the emerging world and you find something similar. “Most people only want to use UPI,” says Govind, a seaside-snack vendor at Juhu, referring to India’s fast-growing payments network.

The Unified Payments Interface (UPI) is a platform that allows free and fast account-to-account transfers using fintech apps such as PhonePe or Google Pay. Unlike Alipay in China, it is open, so users are not locked into a single company and can take their financial history to competitors, notes Praveena Rai, the chief operating officer of the National Payments Corporation of India (NpCI), which manages the platform. And it is facilitated by QR codes or easy-to-remember virtual IDs.


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