India leaps ahead on payments

The difference is that in Silicon Valley you can just promise the stars themselves and gamblers start throwing money at you. Web3 might not be a real thing, but the addiction is. It's like an MLM, the product hardly matters if you can sell it as an opportunity. Unfortunately it's not an opportunity for most people.

Good for India for creating some actual open banking innovation here that scales both in performance and cost.

Investors have thrown trillions into the crypto shit show that still can't scale to more than a couple thousand people with transactions that cost like $15. A failure if there ever was one, but the people pushing it don't exactly care about reality.

A while ago, there was a thread in reddits /r/India, asking the users - what's one thing about India that you are truly proud of. The top answer wasn't a monument, a person or anything else. It was UPI.

Everyone in India who has been abroad knows that UPI is leagues beyond what we see in other countries. Everyone seems to love it. Specially in tier 1 cities like Hyderabad, UPI is the primary mode of payment.

So i am happy to see that the one Indian software system which is genuinely good is being made international

This article is comparing apples (Web3) with oranges (India's UPI network).

Web3 is not only about person-to-person or person-to-business payments. Whatever your opinion of Web3, it's an apple to UPI's orange.

UPI is great. Imagine Zelle or Venmo, but ubiquitious and available for anyone with an Indian resident bank account and mobile number to use. But ... SEPA instant credit in the EU does that as well, and it is instantaneous (most transfers under 5 seconds). UK's Faster Payments system is also similar. Faster Payments interoperates with SEPA as far as I'm aware.

Japan and Singapore also have similar systems, and even the US Federal Reserve has some aspirations in this area[1,2].

UPI's success is significant because it's relatively low-income target audience is very sensitive to charge surcharges, and card infrastructure is often problematic for poorer sellers. Direct transfers to bank accounts via UPI are hugely preferred -- although note that despite enormous growth in digital payments, cash is still king in India. So UPI is used far more than SEPA -- in Europe debit cards are quite ubiquitious, credit cards are not unheard of (varies by country), and of course contactless payments are becoming more popular.

Challenges to UPI: as use grows, so do abuse/scams, and being a free service, there's no payment protection or dispute resolution built in. You have to go to the Indian police and courts system if you were scammed, which is (to put it politely) not the most pleasant experience. The other is that UPI (last I checked) needs an Indian phone number with an Indian resident bank account. If you're in India as a tourist for a couple of weeks, sorry, you can't use it for now.

That said, India's central bank has announced plans to link credit cards with UPI -- India's RuPay cards (a local competitor to Mastercard and Visa) for now, but in theory Mastercard and Visa could come later. That'd certainly make life better for tourists to India, although I don't see this as giving Zelle, Venmo, Paypal etc sleepless nights in the short-medium term.

From the article:

> A French company, Lyra Network, just announced it would deploy UPI. Entrance into the European Union is just the latest international move for UPI ... Merchants in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Philippines, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Bhutan, accept UPI payments through QR-code payment systems common in Asia. The National Payments Corporation of India is now negotiating with Australia to integrate UPI with Australia’s own nascent fast payment rail, called New Payments Platform.

...and again, this is why this opinion piece is lightweight. It takes the PR headlines of UPI and tries to paint a picture that doesn't exist in reality. The main talking points Indian media had about this was: "you can now use UPI/RuPay in France!". Ok. But most Indians in France currently do have Mastercard and Visa. Yes, increasing integration of UPI around the world will reduce Indian travellers' need to have Mastercard & Visa, but let's get real, Visa/MC will remain ubiquitous for the foreseeable future.

In case anyone from NPCI is reading this -- how about opening up UPI to international users? I suspect it's not a technical blocker, but a policy blocker. But it will directly benefit the Indian tourism industry.

[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2019/08/05/investing/fed-real-time-p...

[2] https://www.frbservices.org/financial-services/fednow/about....