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While the UPI has revolutionised the way we transfer money nowadays, there’s still a large chunk of people across the country who don’t own smartphones, without which it’s impossible to make such transactions regularly. But there may be hope for these feature phone users, too, to be able to get online. And how nice would it be if they could do it by giving a hassle-free missed call to the intended recipient?
In March this year, the Reserve Bank of India launched an initiative to take the Unified Payment Interface (UPI) to feature phone users. Named UPI123, this feature will “materially improve the options for such users to access UPI, the central bank said.
One of the first players in this emerging sector was MissCallPay, a Mumbai-based fintech company that promises to simplify payments “for the next billion”. It says by using its services, feature phone users can access their bank accounts, transfer funds, and make bill payments by giving a missed call. Once a user gives a missed call, they will get a callback from MissCallPay for authenticating the transaction using their UPI PIN.
“UPI is primarily for tech-savvy smartphone users. The total user on UPI today is barely 260 million. Almost 910 million people today are aloof to the UPI revolution,” MissCallPay founder Mitesh L Thakker told The Indian Express online.
“The premise behind UPI123 Pay is that it should cater to a greater section of our Bharat. Users should be doing all transactions almost digitally, and that is the whole focus of the government,” he added.
Thakker said that MissCallPay services would be available in 12 Indian languages, including Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Telugu and Marathi, since most feature phone users live in the hinterland and may not be comfortable with the English language.
On security, Thakker told The Indian Express that it’s not easy to compromise MissCallPay, pointing out that the system returns the call within 10 seconds of a user giving it a missed call. So, it’s harder to spoof.
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