India's UPI Payments

The cluster focuses on India's Unified Payments Interface (UPI), praising its revolutionary instant, free, and widespread digital payment system that enables P2P and merchant transactions via QR codes or phone numbers, often contrasting it with slower, costlier US systems like Venmo or ACH.

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Keywords

PhonePe US ON NEFT BS youtu.be P2P HUGE OT SMS upi india payments payment transactions bank qr code banks qr bank account

Sample Comments

kiratp Aug 3, 2023 View on HN

No thank you. This is how you get something like UPI in India.https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36980279

achow May 9, 2019 View on HN

True.In India UPI (Unified Payment Interface) brought in some sort of revolution in P2P & merchant digital payment transactions. No mention of that.As of March 2019 there are 142 banks live on UPI with a monthly volume of 799.54 million transactions and a value of ₹1.334 trillion (US$19 billion)... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Payments_Interface

0_____0 Feb 3, 2025 View on HN

India has UPI. The RBI spun it up in what, a couple years?The issue isn't technological, it's this notion in the US that rent-seekers ought to exist and be enabled. Your Paypal/Venmo, CashApp, etc. enable things, for a cut of the transaction, that you can do for exactly zero dollars in India.

MinimalAction Jul 25, 2025 View on HN

India did great by introducing UPI and subsequently RuPay to face these duopoly behemoths. UPI replaced queues to ATMs in general since one could typically scan a QR code and have the amount transferred in seconds. This is far more modern than ACH equivalents US has. But the downside is that it is a debit transaction; if you're scammed, there is usually no way to retrieve it unless a court orders so.

hesarenu Oct 27, 2020 View on HN

So similar to India's UPI?

sandGorgon Jul 15, 2017 View on HN

For those who are interested in these kind of things, you should check out UPI API built by the government of India. With a singular goal - to kill Visa and MasterCard and make digital payments free in India.The ultimate goal is to tax on consumption - tax payer base in the world's fastest growing economy is abysmally small. So the economists kind of gave up there and leapfrogged into building a digital economy : make all transactions free and charge GST on consumption.The API is bril

rk06 Jan 20, 2026 View on HN

Indian here. UPI (QR code for payment) is huge. UPI adoption is extremely high.In no-trust society like India, where fake note, torn notes, fake coins can strike anyone. UPI is blessing to most.

amf12 Jan 1, 2019 View on HN

India has gone a step ahead with their UPI based payment system. You don't even need to transfer money between your bank account and your mobile wallet. With the UPI interface you can use your cellphone to transfer money to another person or business just like China, and it doesn't expose your account numbers.

hackernewds Feb 23, 2023 View on HN

The west should follow how revolutionary India's UPI system is. Even illiterate vegetable sellers use it in the villages - it's fast, reliable, cross-banking and does KYC stunningly well.

logicuce Aug 10, 2020 View on HN

I don't know how much you know about payments in India, but they are, from what I have heard, fairly evolved and advance.In fact, in India there are 4 different ways in which you can do online transfers across the banks (NEFT, RTGS, IMPS, and UPI). The latest iteration, UPI, is indeed state-of-art. It lets even companies like Amazon, Google, and PhonePe, which are not traditionally banks, to offer ability for people to do transfers from their Bank account. QR Code for UPI apps are very c