Wallets were excluded from the unified payments interface (UPI) as banks wanted time to to catch up to them in terms of services, AP Hota, MD and CEO of the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) told MediaNama in an interview. The NPCI is the umbrella organization which handles all retail payments systems in India, while UPI is a payments architecture that will allow users to make a transaction without divulging their account via aliases (such as shashidhar@hdfcbank) and will allow pull-based payments. More on that here. "Wallets already provide a great user experience," Hota said. "The only limitation is that they can do it in their ecosystem. Paytm can sign up with a number of ecommerce sites and bill payment companies and the payments work there. "Bank applications do not have such a great user experience. So the banks asked give us time to catch up and leave the wallets out of it. It is just a competitive position." But wallets still have opportunities, according to Hota: "Wallets have a great user experience. They will start offering better things to customers say something like automatic redemption of loyalty points. The wallets are gearing up so that banks can't catch up. The wallets can use the UPI to load money faster and they can even issue a command when the wallet's balance is low, it will automatically pull money into the wallet". Edited excerpts from the interview: On the UPI 1. Why wallets aren't inter-operable: Today users can't transfer money from one wallet to another: they aren't interoperable. Hota…
