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Comment by MinimalAction | Hacker News Reader

India did great by introducing UPI and subsequently RuPay to face these duopoly behemoths. UPI replaced queues to ATMs in general since one could typically scan a QR code and have the amount transferred in seconds. This is far more modern than ACH equivalents US has. But the downside is that it is a debit transaction; if you're scammed, there is usually no way to retrieve it unless a court orders so.

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It feels broadly desirable to have a court decide what is and isn't a scam and perhaps hand out punishment instead of having a private entity act as the judge and executioner.

Absolutely. Except that it is much harder to raise a dispute with UPI than, say, with a Chase card that used Visa network. But, I much prefer the national offerings to a private company charging as much as 0.5% of transaction value for doing almost nothing.

> But the downside is that it is a debit transaction; if you're scammed, there is usually no way to retrieve it unless a court orders so.

in a practical sense, UPI is primarily positioned to facilitate digital transactions in a cash-first economy. while it would be nice to have safeguards against scams, especially as qr codes become more ubiquitous by the day. however, paying with cash did not have any inherent safety features either, so it is equivalent in terms of risk imho.

although i do have a personal anecdote of getting a payment reversed when a pos double charged me. i did have receipts and had to wait a few weeks, but in theory it is possible in regular scenarios (i.e. when it is between an individual and a business).

I work in Banking, and RBI (India's Banking Regulatory organization) has enforced stringent norms for UPI transactions behind the scenes, especially for chargebacks/disputes, to ensure that the UPI transactions are processed faster and easier by the Banks and intermediary processors, with the aim that customers get transparency and accountability in digital payments.

So stringent in fact, that RBI shut down PayTM Payments Bank which was most popular market leader in that sector, because PayTM flouted the mandated norms for digital payments and payments banking.

That is also beside the fact that UPI platform has high uptime and rarely faces any outages.

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