It makes me sad that there are so many misconceptions about UPI that people are willing to resort to falsehoods (such as CBDCs and privacy) and it shows that most criticisms are from people that haven't used it in the real world.
There are misconceptions about UPI all right, but a lot of it is from UPI proponents who have no idea what dispute resolution means.
Order a bed and pay via UPI, say. Get a chair instead. These type of commercial disputes are difficult for a payments service to adjudicate.
When you use the term “falsehoods”, keep in mind that a lot of these criticisms come from people who’ve worked in payments for decades, and know a fair bit about customer protection.
If we’re going to talk about falsehoods, we should also talk about the falsehoods UPI proponents share about card payments.
And to be clear, my focus is customer protection. I don’t give a flying fish about the mechanism.
The UK’s Faster Payments system predates UPI. Free, near-instant payments round the clock. IMPS, the tech that powers UPI, came around 2 years later.
But UPI as a layer on top of IMPS is great, especially the idea of providing an easy you@bank identifier. By contrast Faster Payments is like 102030-12345678. And being designed post iPhone was actually a blessing because it allowed UPI to have a mobile-first deployment strategy.
But UPI also makes a virtue out of necessity: the reality that cards and a protected e-payment mechanism are difficult to organise, especially for India’s less-well off.
This then turns into nationalistic chest thumping about “jealous foreigners”, while completely ignoring real issues around customer protection and scenarios that UPI doesn’t enable.
To be clear: I wish UPI well. I also want to see less opportunities for scammers in UPI and for people to be able to use UPI with confidence knowing they will be easily refunded if things go wrong.
It’s honestly tiresome to have reasoned conversations with nationalistic chest thumpers.
It makes me sad that there are so many misconceptions about UPI that people are willing to resort to falsehoods (such as CBDCs and privacy) and it shows that most criticisms are from people that haven't used it in the real world.