Online travel agent yatra-.com has introduced unified
payment interface (UPI) as a paying method on its website, across all business
lines. UPI
App is a system that allows account holders of all banks to send or receive
money from their smartphones without the need to enter their net banking user
id or password.
"Essentially we have launched UPI as a payment option
on our website, and anybody who has a virtual payment address (VPA) registered
with their bank, can make a payment directly using the UPI flow," said
Sharat Dhall, chief operating officer (B2C) at yatra.com.
Users can download an UPI app such as ICICI Bank’s Pockets
and create a VPA, linking it to their account in any bank to start using the
system developed by National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), the agency
that handles all retail payments in India.
Yatra.com is the first in the online travel agency segment
to offer UPI on its platform. It has tied up with Bank for technical
integration of the payment method.
ET had reported last week that NPCI was getting
"impatient" with merchants – especially online ones that are expected
to generate the bulk of such payments – for being slow to warm up to UPI-based
payments.
The system, which merges several banking features on a
single mobile application to enable seamless fund routing and merchant
payments, was launched in August. Yatra.com already allows customers to make
online payments through net banking, mobile wallets and credit/debit cards.
Dhall said adoption of UPI by online players such as
yatra.com would drive higher customer adoption of this "seamless"
system.
"In the case of a wallet, you need to transfer money
from your bank account to the wallet and there is a cap of `20,000 after which
you have to provide a KYC. As adoption of this increases, you're likely to see
a shift from wallets to UPI," he told ET.
While UPI as a payment option is only available on Yatra's
website now, work is on to launch it on the firm’s mobile app shortly. One
benefit of this system is the lower merchant discount rate (MDR), or the fee a
merchant has to pay a bank to access its payment infrastructure.
The MDR for a UPI
transaction is "significantly lower" than what is charged on credit
cards and close to MDR charged on debit cards, Dhall said. MDR is not
applicable on UPI until January 31.
Yatra had approximately 4.4 million cumulative customers as
of June 30, 2016. In the last financial year, 74 per cent transactions were
from repeat customers, and 59 per cent customer traffic was from mobile.
Source:[https://goo.gl/IxB2jZ]
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