UPI: What’s New?

It has been five years now since the launch of UPI. A mobile-based, real-time payments platform, the concept of UPI is very simple – a vision to make payments as easy as sending a message. UPI has now crossed 80 million transactions a day, processing $1.34 Billion in value monthly. Now, over 216 banks have gone live with UPI compared to 153 in April 2020 and 21 in April 2016.

FSS is a leading player in the UPI market and one of the first providers to offer UPI 2.0 services. FSS UPI 2.0 opens an endless world of possibilities, enabling PSPs to build innovative propositions to satisfy a range of customers’ payment needs and generate new business value.

To help PSPs address exponential growth, we have enhanced our platform functionality. FSS Currents is a select picking of features we have developed in the last six months

VoiceIT for Interactive, Engaging Services Experience

Voice-based interfaces enable banks engage their customers in an intelligent, interactive, two-way conversation that traditionally a human banker can do in a banking or contact centre. 

India is recording a 270% year-on-year growth in voice searches according to Google, indicative of the potential of leveraging voice to help consumers conduct everyday transactions. As the current pandemic has driven the growth of contact free payment methods, usage of voice assistants in banking and payments is growing.

FSS UPI enables conversational transactions through UPI app, enabling a conversational service experience that improves customer engagement. Customers can activate VoiceIT services using the UPI app. FSS UPI is compatible with leading voice bots and supports a range of financial and non-financial transactions. This includes:

• Initate a Collect Request
• Manage Accounts
• Balance Enquiry
• View Transaction History
• Raise Service Requests. As an example, issue a card

A comprehensive set of security measures including strong encryption, use of Voice PIN for customer verification and out of band authentication assure transaction integrity.

Click here to watch how VoiceIT works.

Multi-lingual Support for Better Accessibility

Customers prefer to conduct financial transactions in a language they understand. FSS UPI, in addition to English, supports major Indian languages -- Hindi, Gujarati, Oriya, Assamese, Bengali, Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam, Punjabi, Tamil and Marathi, enabling customers to conduct financial transactions in a language with which they are familiar. Customers can set their language preference using the UPI app.

AutoPay Deliver Assured Revenues

Research conducted by Harvard Business School states that a customer retention rate of 5% can boost business by 25%. To drive P2M transactions and to bring repeat customers, FSS UPI supports automatic payments.

With Auto Pay, customers can schedule payments at their convenience. Customers need to provide the following details for auto-debits:

• Recurrence type as per business requirements
• Recurrence rule
  •      On
  •      Before
  •      After
• Amount type
  •      Fixed
  •      Maximum (for variable amount mandates)
• Validity of the AutoPay Request

The scope of UPI Autopay extends to multiple use cases. This includes:

• EMI payments for loans, insurance, mutual funds without missing out due dates
• School and college tuition fees easily without the need of setting reminders
• Subscription payments
• Buy now, pay later in e-commerce shopping
• Corporate pay-outs (Payroll)
• Business-to-Business payments

Click here to watch how UPI AutoPay works.

Changes in RRN Logic to Accommodate Peak UPI Traffic

When the Internet was founded, IP version 4 (IPv4) was the addressing protocol. But due to its binary nature, it could only accommodate 2^32 = 4.3 billion unique IP Addresses. Very soon the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) realized that with a projected growth of up to 15 devices per user, this addressing mechanism was inadequate. They gradually started shifting to IPv6 with 2^128 unique possible combinations. A similar problem is being faced by UPI today.

When a transaction is initiated, a unique Retrieval Reference Number (RRN) is generated by the initiating PSP. The RRN functions as a identifier for the transaction.

The current nomenclature construction is as below:

Currently the UPI system is designed to support 1 million RRNs every hour. In peak hours, the number of RRNs exceed the hourly cap, resulting in additional reconciliation related overheads.

To address the issue, the current RRN syntax has been revised wherein HH replaces Trace number SS to accommodate 100 million unique RRNs (10^8) in 24 hours from a single Payer /Payee PSP. The new RRN construction is:

This will reduce transaction declines due to duplicate RRNs and also help in reconciliation in case of any dispute. Based on the revised RRN construct, the Payer/Payee PSP will have the capability of generating 76 million additional RRNs from PSP in 24 hours.

Strong Authentication -- Software Security Module

The current use of HSM for key management escalates the overall cost of UPI deployment. FSS UPI has introduced the Software Security Model (SSM) for UPI PIN (or any other authentication method) generation and validation to maintain data integrity. To enhance transaction security and protect user credentials, private keys used for transaction processing and digital signing are stored in a tamper-resistant environment. FSS UPI enables PSPs to configure the UPI PIN generation and validation settings during the initial implementation using the SSM. Based on the configuration, UPI mobile application can initiate the second factor of authentication (UPI PIN) which would be validated by SSM for every transaction to ensure end-to-end security and confidentiality of UPI.

• Send Money (On-Us)
• Send Money (Off-Us)
• Confirm Collect (On-Us)
• Confirm Collect (Off-Us)
• Debit Transaction (On-Us)
• Balance Enquiry (On-Us)
• Confirm Mandate (On-Us)
• Confirm Mandate (Off-Us)
• Change PIN

Way Forward

It is easy to predict the continued growth of real-time payments in India. The maturing of real-time payments adoption presents a major opportunity to accelerate and innovate around digitised customer experiences. To increase market share, PSPs, need to build a wide partner ecosystem and offer innovative verticalized use cases. FSS continues to bring rich digital overlays to help PSPs capture the added value that the market is craving.