MUMBAI: Come April and customers can simply use their Aadhaar number to make purchases at merchant stores without having to use a credit, debit card or even a mobile wallet.
Thanks to the government's Aadhaar Payment System (APS), which is expected to be rolled out on April 14, the move will enable hundreds of customers without a smartphone to make digital payments.
"The idea is to facilitate more customers to make cashless transactions and reduce the use of cash," said A P Hota, managing director and CEO, National Payments Corporation of India, the implementing agency.
APS is a unique method that allows digital payments using a combination of Aadhaar number and either biometrics or iris-based authentication. This will help customers who are uncomfortable using plastic cards or wallets citing security concerns.
Around 20 banks are expected to go live on April 14 and more banks and merchant stores are expected to get on board with time.
It may be recalled that the government had earlier requested all public-sector banks to go live with APS and the NPCI, the implementing agency, has extended help to the banks to ensure a smooth rollout.
"We are planning to reach the target of 25 million cashless transactions during the current fiscal," Hota said here on Thursday. Addressing media at the launch of the country's first in-store UPI payments facility in pact with Reliance Retail, he said currently there are over 2.4 million point-of-sale terminals across the country, and this could touch 5.4 million by the end of FY17.
Reeling out numbers, Hota said since the launch of the UPI platform last April, 44 banks now allow unified payments and collectively register over 2.2 lakh payments per day with an average transaction value of `3,000. Of this 2.2 lakh, roughly 90,000 are processed using the Bhim app.
Meanwhile, NPCI has tied up with Reliance Retail to roll out of the new technology and starting April, 200 outlets of Reliance Retail in Mumbai will accept UPI payments for purchases through in-store PoS machines. The facility will be later extended pan-India gradually, and NPCI is in dialogue with other merchant providers to replicate the payment model.