Digital payments: Google wants US Fed to replicate India's UPI model

The US Federal Reserve, or the Fed, should replicate India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) model for its proposed interbank real-time gross settlement (RTGS) service, Google has recommended.
Launched in 2016, the UPI is the country’s flagship real-time payments system, which allows users to transfer money directly from their bank accounts. Since it works across multiple bank accounts, without revealing the details of one’s account to the other party, it makes paying someone as simple as handing over cash. It clocked 1.2 billion transactions in November, valued at Rs 1.89 trillion. Citing the UPI’s phenomenal success in India, Google, in a letter to the Fed, said FedNow should be an open system, like the UPI.
“We’ve been pretty vocal that we believe the right model for driving digital payments is through partnership between banks, governments and tech companies through open and standard-based infrastructures like UPI,” tweeted Caesar Sengupta, general manager & vice-president, payments and Next Billion Users at Google.
In August, the Fed announced that it would develop a “new interbank 24x7x365 RTGS with integrated clearing functionality to support faster payments in the United States”. The Fed Board asked for comments on FedNow by November. In reply to this, Google mentioned its experience of launching Google Pay - Google’s payments app which uses the UPI -in India. Read More