My experience of setting up UPI from a basic phone for my house help

Shanti (name changed) works at my place and she cooks for us and cleans the house. She has two children. I noticed that she goes to her village to collect pensions for her husband. Her travel expense is quite high in proportion how much she gets in pension. On asking her about pension and how she manages her bank I found out that:

• She has two bank accounts
• One account is with Karnataka Bank branch in her village where she receives the pension from the government. She withdraws cash by going to this bank branch.
• Another account is in Bangalore with Indian Overseas Bank. This account she uses for only for getting LPG refund. She has a debit card for this account.

So I thought I would help get her set up with online banking and she can probably deal more efficiently with her bank and money. I tried but it was not working out, because either she wouldn’t get time to go to the bank or wouldn’t understand what the bank will tell her. It struck me that I could actually do this sitting at home using UPI. She has two SIMs each connected to each bank account respectively. (She has two SIMs because she doesn’t want to deal with changing the phone number in the bank because of the fear that something else will go wrong and she wouldn’t get the money.) This is where this UPI story starts — of my frustrating and semi-successful attempt to get her set up with UPI.

Not surprising, that she has a basic phone and not a smartphone. I had read about the ability to use UPI via a basic phone using *99# USSD service. Following is my account of how the process of setting up UPI went.

Indian Overseas Bank

• When I dialled *99# I would simply get an error from the bank. The error code was “549, please try after some time”. Or it would say that your bank is taking too long to respond.
• I thought why not try the BHIM app on my smartphone. But BHIM wouldn’t work unless you have the SIM card.
• I took out the SIM from her phone into my phone and tried BHIM again. No luck. I would simply get an error in a second.
• I tried *99# from my phone as well, same result. So it was not because of her phone but something wrong with the *99# service.
• After researching I found that one should use BHIM app released by Indian Overseas Bank on play store. I downloaded the app and then I could set up her UPI.

Karnataka Bank

• With *99# from Shanti’s phone, the UPI service reported insufficient balance. She had some balance (after all one UPI session is supposed to cost less than 1 rupee) — but I still asked her to re-charge with 50 rupees more. But after recharging, nothing changed.
• Switching the SIM to my phone was of no use either, *99# gave the same error.
• Tried BHIM from my phone, but it would simply give an error — the bank is taking too long to respond, although the error just came back within a second.
• There is a Karnataka Bank BHIM app as well, which I thought I would try. The app would not allow me to start the setup process if I am connected to the Internet via Wifi. It said, for security reasons please use data connection. Her SIM doesn’t have data enabled so this meant the end of the road — as I didn’t want her to go for enabling data connection for a SIM, which be used from a basic phone.

I am a big fan of UPI and have used it a lot. But the number of basic/feature phones are probably slightly higher than smartphone. This whole experience has not left me very enthused about USSD + UPI as a product — it is poorly designed. It is difficult to tell where the gap in the backend is, i.e. UPI, Bank or Mobile Provider — but it doesn’t seem like an insurmountable one — given the benefits to people.

I transferred part of her salary to her bank account. So that she can withdraw only when she needs it and till then she earns some interest on it. The bank automatically deducted some amount from it, when I transferred (I am following it up but this is a different story, about banks). The good side was, she told me that because of this simple bank account balance, she was able to take a loan for her son’s education. This makes me suspicious about the bank’s lending standards, but again this is a different story. Bank, finance, financial records matters a lot and *99# UPI service would do well to such people if they maintain the same quality of service as what we get from our smartphones.