Tech industry veteran Nandan Nilekani on Tuesday introduced more credit products like Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) on the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) following the launch of a credit card on the platform.
The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) on Thursday launched the Rupay credit card on the UPI platform, following an RBI policy enabling it.
“I think on the credit side, I personally see the launch of UPI and Rupay credit card as the first step of credit on UPI,” said Nilekani, non-executive chairman of Infosys and also one of the architects of the UPI platform . an event here.
Nilekani said that “we are testing the waters of credit” by launching the Rupay credit card on UPI and called it a “sensible first step”.
“As we go forward, and as I think the RBI gets more confident with this, they will open up to more forms of credit on the UPI card and so there will be new native credit capabilities on UPI, like BNPL and so on. Nilekani said.
“And imagine if there are 405 million people on UPI, and if they have access to native credit through BNPL tools and using the digital footprint of their transactions, there will be a massive democratization of credit usage by consumers in a very very healthy way.” said Nilekani.
“You push based on the data,” Nilekani said, showing confidence that this could be the next big thing.
The popularity of UPI is driven by third-party apps like Google and PhonePe. The Reserve Bank has concerns about the prepaid payment instruments being used for BNPL.
Meanwhile, Nilekani said credit available through UPI based on the account aggregation system launched last year, along with the Open Network Digital Commerce (ONDC) initiative will “fundamentally reorder” the supply chain in the ‘India to be much more efficient and much easier to reach. products and services for everyone.
He said that ONDC will make all retailers play against the giants by allowing the presence of e-commerce and thus it is a very important step.
