Ringing the changes: how the developing world is using cellphones to move to a cashless economy
A good article in The Economist, “A digital payments revolution in India”, reflects the growth of digital payment systems around the world outside Apple Pay, WeChat, Samsung Pay, Kakao Pay and the like. These digital systems are being implemented in places like India or Brazil, which use open systems based on UPI, Unified Payments Interface.
UPI was created by the National Payment Corporation of India (NPCI), founded in April 2009 to integrate all payment mechanisms in India and make them uniform for all retail payments. In March 2011, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) found that the average citizen made only six non-cash transactions each year, even though more than 10 million retailers accepted card payments. At the time, around 145 million households had no access to any kind of bank account, posing the problem of dealing with black money and corruption, which took place mainly with cash.
In 2012, the RBI published a vision in which it committed to developing a secure, efficient, accessible, accessible, inclusive, interoperable and authorized payment and settlement system for the country. This was part of the Green Initiative to reduce the use of paper in the domestic payments market. The UPI system was officially launched in 2016 for public use linked to…
