The fact that wallets were not allowed to be a part of the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) has been a bone of contention with players for over a year and a half. Now that wallets are allowed to function on the UPI with the revised guidelines from the RBI, there are some issues that players need to take into consideration. What about merchants? The RBI guidelines give clarity that wallet-to-wallet transactions (i.e. money from a Paytm account can go to MobiKwik account and vice versa) and wallet-to-bank accounts transactions (and perhaps cut down the fee wallets charge while transferring to bank accounts) will be possible via the UPI. But no clarity was given in the guidelines on how the UPI will work for wallets and their merchants. The issue can be crystallized from a question from MediaNama's Aroon Deep: Can the BHIM payment app be used to pay a merchant on Paytm's network through the UPI? QR code payments were pioneered by wallet players in India but are closed networks which do not allow users to pay at merchants using various payment modes. However, wallet players were not allowed on the BharatQR as well by card networks. But now, the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) mandated that QR codes generated by the UPI will be merged with the ones generated by BharatQR. The NPCI also asked companies to ensure that their applications be equipped to read both UPI QR as well as BharatQR by 15th September 2017. Will the NPCI also ask…
