Earlier this month, we saw the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) introduce a UPI payments service for feature phones designed to work without an active internet connection. Now, to further enable users to make small-value transactions, that too offline, the NPCI (National Payments Corporation of India) has announced an on-device wallet called UPI Lite in India. Check out the details below.
The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) informed its member banks about the launch of its new offline, on-device wallet that will be similar to Paytm and Mobikwik via an official circular. UPI Lite will enable users to make small-value transactions in offline mode, and it will be in line with RBI’s recent offline UPI payments service.
The NPCI says that the UPI Lite wallet will initially process transactions in a “near offline mode.” This means that the UPI Lite wallet will record the debit payments in offline mode, while the credit payments will be updated once the user is online. However, NPCI says that UPI Lite will be able to record both debit and credit transactions in offline mode eventually.
Now, it is worth mentioning that users will need to be online to add funds to UPI Lite. Moreover, they will be required to provide additional factor authentication (AFA) when adding funds or use the UPI AutoPay feature to automatically add funds to the wallet when it reaches a certain limit. Although it’s not mandatory.
Coming to the availability of the UPI Lite wallet, unfortunately, there is no information about the exact launch timeline yet. However, it will be initially launched as a pilot, and we can expect the service to launch nationally in the coming months.
