True Balance offering UPI Service as a New Payment method to Users in Collab with PayU India

Taking India one step closer to become a cashless economy, TrueBalance, Softbank-backed balance and data management mobile app has tied up with PayU to connect customers and merchants by enabling seamless payments through a digital platform. 

TrueBalanceis on the verge of expanding its business by way of providing e-commerce platform enabling customers to have the benefits of EMI on payment, insurance, and purchase of products.

UPI
launched in India in 2016, allows bank-account holders to transact
using their smartphones by just feeding in their Aadhaar numbers or
mobile phone numbers instead of entering bank account details. PayU is a
Netherlands-based fintech company providing a safe payment technology
to online merchants. This True Balance-PayU tie-up strengthens the Digital India initiative through TrueBalance’s vision of targeting the untapped one billion mobile phone users without access to digital financial services.

Commenting on the launch, Mr. Charlie Lee, CEO, True Balance said, “Foreseeing the announcement of the launch of 1 lakh Digital Village in India during the budget, UPI will play a key role in empowering the next Billion. We have recently launched our KYC compliance for customers, and I am extremely delighted to introduce our new fintech service in India in collaboration with PayU India.”

All True Balance app
users will be able to make safe and seamless payments of all the
existing products and utility bill payments using the UPI platform.

Further elaborating on the partnership with True Balance, Rahul Kothari, Chief Business Officer, Enterprise Business, PayU India, said,
“UPI clocked whooping 672 million transactions till last month. This
clearly indicates that UPI has changed the way people look at money. We
can see the paradigm shift in consumer behavior, moving towards digital
payment alternatives than cash-based transactions. Our partnership with True Balance will also open new opportunities for people in tier 2/3 regions and help them quickly stride on the UPI wave,”

In 2014, the mobile application True balance was launched in Korea by Mr. Cheolwon Lee (Charlie Lee), an alumnus of the University of Chicago. In 2016, True Balance was founded in India to empower the next billion and to enable seamless mobile bill recharges; which has garnered more than 70 million downloads so far. True balance is ‘One Stop Payment “solution for all utility bill payments and foresees to provide small loans for these services to its users.

In March 2016, True Balance raised an undisclosed amount from SoftBank Ventures Korea .

True Balance is aiming to serve India 2 and 3 with utility payment and providing financial platform for all. True Balance is
aligned with the mission of digital India and focus on providing the
rural population an experience for easy and safe utility bill management
and payments through use of mobile technology.

Google To Launch UPI Based Payment App 'Tez' in India Next Week

With increase in it focus on India, Google is entering to localized digital payment service in India. The search giant is all set to launch a Unified Payments Interface (UPI)-based digital payment service called "Tez" as early as next week. The media report also suggest the launch date to be 18 September.

The report further claims that Google ‘Tez’ will offer a comprehensive set of payment options beyond existing products like Google Wallet or Android Pay. Tez, for one thing, will include support for Unified Payments Interface (UPI) — a payment system backed by the government -- and other consumer payment services including Paytm and MobiKwik. Apparently it will be a dedicated app when it arrives.

Other big player to join India's growing digital payment market is Facebook-owned WhatsApp. Other mobile messaging platforms like WeChat and Hike Messenger already support UPI-based payment services. While, India's e-commerce giant Flipkart's owned Phonepe has just recently surpassed most number of UPI transactions in the country so much so that it overtakes Indian government's own UPI-based app BHIM in August.

Notably -- with Tez app -- Google is making a big push into payments outside of the U.S. and probably for the first time outside its home country.

Google in increasingly focusing on India's digital payment market because -- it has a strong consumer presence in India, India's huge growth and potential in same.

According to media reports, while WhatsApp is already in talks with the NPCI and a few banks to facilitate financial transactions via UPI Google had already filed (on 27 June 2017) an application for wordmark 'Tez' Controller General of Patents, Designs, and Trade Marks, a department of India’s commerce and industry ministry

As per RBI data, India saw nearly a billion digital transactions in July (859.2 million to be precise). Besides, the internet user base, anywhere between 370 and 450 million, is consistently growing. Not to forget, India is also the second largest smartphone market in the world. And most importantly, India’s digital payments industry is expected to be worth $500 billion by 2020, as per a report by GSMA and Boston Consulting Group (BCG).

Moreover, Amazon too is planning to launch digital wallet in India and has even gotten a license for same.

With 15+ Pending Patents, This Startup Could Revolutionize Payment Tech in India

With each passing day new technologies are coming up to make humans life simpler and easy. MegPay is a new revolutionary centralized financial & payments technology startup which is finding the ways to solve payments problems for economic change.

A number of ground-breaking innovations are disrupting the financial sector and facilitating easy transactions by linking Aadhaar card to the customer’s credit and debit cards. In this segment, MegPay Systems is a new invention which is invented especially for common bank users. This is developed by Panigrahi Labs and based on Unique Identification Card (UID) technology.

Aashish Panigrahi founded Panigrahi Labs in 2015 to develop a number of scientific tech software to make human life easier. Currently Aashish, an inventor and technologist is working on MegPay Systems. He says, “This technology will help to promote the mass adoption of real-time payment systems all along centralizing the entire payment structure in India.” He has applied for more than 15 patents associated with Aadhaar Card based payments technology and working on all the related products together. He shared that all these technologies will be applied in several sectors including e-commerce, healthcare, education etc.

Technology Linked to Aadhaar or UIDARS

Panigrahi claims that this technology is totally going to change the current face of money transaction systems in India. He adds, “We are coming up with a bunch of innovations to make payments transparent and simpler especially for the common users. Simultaneously, it will also help the government and banks to keep track of an individual's finances and help in investigating financial fraud cases easily.” Furthermore, MegPay is a more secure than most of the current payment systems deployed in India as it utilizes two secure layer systems which uses the conventional code based entry as well as proprietary recognition technology – “Unique Identification Card Advanced Recognition System” or UIDARS. UIDARS can detect and alarm the users about unauthorized usages and block the locations all in real time. This technique can be used for the purpose of e-governance by associating the social security schemes such as for payment of student loans, receiving cash under various government schemes and others.

Target Area

So far money distribution system is in clutter form in India because there is huge complexity at every level in the banking and financial systems. More problematic is common users are exploited at every level. According to World Bank report there are more than 700 million bank accounts in India. A citizen can hold multiple accounts in multiple banks at multiple locations which make it really difficult for user to centrally access his bank accounts for making transactions easily.

In addition, if the user doesn't have access to the specific account's credit/debit card associated with the account he can't make payments. Moreover, Panigrahi is aiming to target these pain point areas and hopes that the developed technologies will truly empower common people as well as the enterprises to do safe and secure payments hassle free and cost just 0.5 – 1 percent of total amount of transactions.

Making Accessible to all Users

MegPay Systems is a financial technology right to use for anyone who has an access to a unique identification card and bank account. The biggest consumer base of this technology is common people who have to send or receive money. Moreover Indian government has currently passed the Aadhaar bill. According to this bill, using Aadhaar/UID card for receiving benefits of social security schemes is necessary. So bringing access to Aadhaar/UID card based payments technology to masses will favour government’s various policies’ framework automatically. The second biggest user will be government itself as the government agencies who are investigating frauds or other crimes such as economic offenses need access to a citizen's transaction database. Panigrahi adds, “We are also scaling up to make this tech work even without a bank account adding several other users.”

Below is a proposed preview of MegPay's WhatsApp and Telegram messenger based payments technology

Hard-hitting Competition

As this technology disrupts the payment systems, it affects the usage of Credit card, Debit card and many other forms of transaction technologies including digital wallets, MasterCard, Visa, American Express etc. Unified Payments Interface is also in competition as it is leveraging smart phones for payments through UID cards. However MegPay systems is made to be device independent which means a person can make payments with or without access to internet/smartphone. Moreover, Panigrahi is developing algorithms to make this technology even accessible to people without any bank accounts to make receive payments.

Challenges MegPay is Facing

There is huge uncertainty in development of regulatory policies in India. Increasing amount of financial regulations is one of the key challenges that will make little difficult for MegPay to grow swiftly. Another biggest roadblock is bringing this technology to the full scale require funding but most of the startups like Panigrahi lacks funds. He adds, “Right now we don't have sufficient capital for applying for potential patents which we can receive in this sector and even above that for running a payments processing company which provides credit, the processing company needs to provide initial capital during transaction which means a company should have that much capital in the first place."

We wish Panigrahi good luck for what he has planned to do!

India has Just Applied For A Patent for Its Unified Payments Interface (UPI) System Technology

The National Patents Corporation of India (NPCI) has filed a patent application form for its Unified Payments Interface (UPI) system that was launched earlier this year in April and went live in the county last month i.e. August, 2016. Ever since going live, the technology has gained immense popularity among masses.

Unified Payments Interface offers bank customers a seamless payments mechanism to send and receive money via their smartphones, that too in real time. One of the factors that has helped UPI become famous among the masses in absolutely no time is the extraordinary simplicity that it offers to its end-users. All a person requires to make a transfer of funds is a connected smartphone and an identifier such as an email address of the account of the person to whom the money has to be transferred.

In order to make it easier for the Indian banks to offer UPI applications for smartphones, a special effort has been made to build UPI on the extremely secure and robust Immediate Payment Service network. Currently, 21 banks are live on UPI and their apps can be easily downloaded from Google Play Store.

NPCI, which is a RBI backed entity, was able to develop and make the back end payments settlements technology a reality with strong support from banks in India.

UPI is being considered as a major step taken by the Indian banking sector to make Indians more accepting of digital payments and make small value transactions between individuals and for merchants much easier than before.

According to NPCI's chief operating officer Dilip Asbe, the corporation has already taken the first step for filing of a patent in India, and now all they have to do is wait and see if such a platform is the first of its kind all around the globe. According to him, it is a long drawn process and would take sometime. He also explained that one of the major reasons behind filing the patent is, that the NPCI wanted to ensure that no one is able to replicate its wonder product.

Apparently, the NPCI is also mulling about filling patents abroad as well. If this does happen, then this would be the second Indian homegrown technology platform that would export to other parts of the world after Aadhaar.