The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) launched a slew of new payment options on the United Payments Interface (UPI) platform, including conversational transactions. RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das announced the launch of the products by NPCI at the ongoing Global Fintech Festival. 

The latest offerings—credit line on UPI, UPI LITE X, and Tap and Pay, Hello! UPI and conversational bill payments—are aimed at creating an inclusive, resilient, and sustainable digital payments ecosystem and will help UPI achieve the target of 100 billion transactions per month. It has partnered with AI4 Bharat at IIT Madras to co-develop Hindi and English payment language models. 

With BillPay Connect, Bharat BillPay introduced a nationalised number for bill payments across the country, NPCI said, adding that customers can conveniently fetch and pay their bills by sending a 'Hi' on the messaging app. Along with this, customers without smartphones or immediate mobile data access will be able to pay bills by giving a missed call as well, it said. 

Additionally, BillPay Connect offers a voice-assisted bill payments facility. Customers can also fetch and pay bills through voice commands on their smart home devices and get instant voice confirmation, it said. 

To expand access to credit and promote financial inclusion and innovation, NPCI has rolled out a credit line on UPI. This will enable pre-sanctioned credit lines from banks via UPI and will revolutionise customer access to credit, fostering a more streamlined and digital banking ecosystem, NPCI said. 

With this, the process of availing, connecting, and utilising credit lines will be significantly expedited, driving economic growth and progress, it said. 

The initiative has several key features, including linking pre-sanctioned credit lines, creation of digital credit products by banks, establishment of interest-free credit periods and corresponding interest rates, defined schedule of charges, customer engagement channels for credit sanction requests, and the ability to link various pre-sanctioned credit lines via UPI-enabled apps for transactions, it stated. 

To ensure seamless interoperability, all UPI apps, including bank and third-party ones, will be empowered to discover and link credit lines on UPI, as well as provide end-to-end customer lifecycle services, it said. 

Through this feature, users can send and receive money while being offline, allowing users to execute transactions even in areas with poor connectivity, NPCI said. 

UPI LITE X will be accessible to anyone with a compatible device that supports Near Field Communication (NFC), offering payments faster than other payment methods, as they require less time to process the transaction. 

The launch took place in the presence of Advisor to NPCI and Infosys Non-Executive Chairman Nandan Nilekani and Non-Executive Chairman of NPCI Biswamohan Mahapatra.