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Comment by varbhat | Hacker News Reader

UPI is not nice.

1) UPI is unreliable. Based on my experience, it doesn't work many times per day. I once needed to beg my friend to pay for me after realizing that it didn't work when i purchased something in shop but had no money(only upi account)

2) It is closed source. UPI forces every App that uses UPI to use it's closed source code.

3) I find Bank transfer like IMPS/NEFT more reliable than UPI.

4) One advantage of UPI is it's id which led to discovery of account (through qr code) . This is also the reason it got adopted by people.

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Can't really confirm on the reliability. I've used UPI for ~3 years now, I don't remember it failing more than maybe 4-5 times. I guess it depends on the bank whose UPI account you are using. Syndicate fails regularly, ICICI is almost always up.

> 3) I find Bank transfer like NEFT more reliable than UPI.

NEFT is great for occasional transfer of a large amount of money, but not for daily transactions as it requires a lot of info compared to UPI (it needs the receivers name, account number, IFSC code, branch name compared to UPI's singular <person>@<bank> id)

1) I was referring to IMPS,not NEFT(mistyped).

2) An ID could be created for IMPS account like in BHIM to mitigate the "lot to fill" problem.

NEFT is not real time like IMPS (on which UPI is built). I don't think it is UPI that is unreliable, it is your bank. I have been using UPI on two accounts, SBI one is the one I face some problem from time to time. I agree with the closed source point, though.

Well, i was referring to IMPS(mistyped as NEFT) as i thought it is more reliable(on which UPI is built).

NEFT now runs on 30 minute batches, and it is 24x7x365. RBI changed it December 2019.

It’s still not real time, but NPCI doesn’t see your transactions :)

Oh that's so convenient, I thought NEFT was still limited to working hours only. I wonder how the technology underneath changed to enable this.

> wonder how the technology underneath changed

80% of fintech is excel sheets getting sent from one system to the other. A lot of these were baby-sit earlier, and RBI changed this over a year or so. They asked for banks to make sure the processes were automated first, then lots of test-runs.

I think another important reason was that the morning rush (build-up of pending transfers) was causing issues and chokepoints. Smaller window-sizes helped fix that.

By babysit, do you mean someone used to go thru the sheets and update all the accounting stuff? I know its a bit idiotic question but I won't be really surprised if that's how it was.

> UPI is unreliable

I have made thousands of UPI payments, make at least 1 payment daily, and never has a payment failed after telling me it has succeeded. I get an immediate fail/pass and that has never been wrong.

> I find Bank transfer like IMPS/NEFT more reliable than UPI.

I find NEFT to be very unreliable in the time it takes to complete the transaction.

I think the main driver of UPI adoption is the immediate nature. It is as fast or faster than transacting in cash. NEFT/IMPS etc need you to add payee, confirm addition using 2 factor, wait for 24 hours to get it unlocked, then the actual payment also takes at least a couple of hours, it doesn't work on weekends. UPI is literally 10 seconds from scanning QR code to the shopkeeper getting a confirmation on their phone. It takes more time to deal with cash!

"UPI is unreliable"

Not saying it is 100% reliable, but there's a good possibility the aggregator you are using (GPay / PhonePay / etc.) might have issues on the whole or with the account.

In my experience it's usually the bank having an issue on their end. If you try to make a transaction late at night, say 2am, there's a good chance your bank is "down for maintenance". My account is with a public bank, not sure if this is true for private banks. Either way, reliability varies from bank to bank.

One reason behind this (communicated to me by a friend who has some insight into the banking system) is that the government has prohibited charging for UPI transactions. So every bank needs to maintain the infrastructure to integrate with UPI but don't make money off it. This leads some to not treat it with priority (a good to have, not a necessity) or treat it like IMPS/NEFT/RTGS (which only work in a fixed time window).

Overall the reliability is still quite good and with increasing reliance of the masses on it, it will hopefully get better.

UPI usage/traffic has grown orders of magnitude each year. That kind of growth isn't handled reliably by the best of the startups even today (remember twitter in its early years?). Banks do invest a lot of money/resources into running/managing UPI but that alone isn't enough. There is no substitute for time and experience (talent) that's needed for the culture change within bank IT teams to mature, and their leadership teams – they have to shift their thinking to deal with the pace of growth and frankly the pace of changes as well.

UPI is extra glue over IMPS, which is definitely more battle-tested.

It is not anymore. It started of like that. The ledgers are completely different. UPI does 8x volumes of IMPS now.

I am downvoted for this comment. I need reasons. Did i tell something fallacy? Ofcourse not.

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