Payment gateway aggregator Razorpay has tied up with ICICI Bank, YES Bank and HDFC Bank for payments over the Unified Payments Interface (UPI). With this, all merchants on Razorpay will be able to have UPI as an option in addition to credit and debit cards, net banking and wallets. It is curious to see Razorpay tying up with multiple banks as CEO Harshil Mathur had told MediaNama that the UPI would eliminate the need for payment gateways to tie up with multiple banks. "When it becomes more mature, instead of having to build 57 bank relationships a gateway has to build right now, it needs to build only one relationship with the UPI. So it will ease our efforts and help out the merchant,” he explained. Mathur added that the company has tied up with multiple banks as the implementation of the UPI is still in its early stages and that Razorpay would see which bank performs well and have a single relationship with them in the future. The company says that it is the first payment gateway to integrate the UPI and that it does not require the addition of code to start offering UPI payment options to their customers. It's interesting to note that banks are allowed to charge merchants a different fee than P2P payments and right now it is capped at the merchant discount rate (MDR) for debit card transactions. Merchants have to pay 0.75% for transactions less than Rs 2,000 to the banks and 1% for…
