NPCI plans to give netbanking a UPI-like makeover

NPCI’s subsidiary NPCI Bharat BillPay Limited (NBBL) is rolling out a pilot to make netbanking interoperable with mobile payments. Banks can join a centralised platform set up by NBBL and directly enable netbanking transactions by leveraging the IMPS (immediate payment service) technology. The initiative is called ‘Netbanking 2.0’ and is currently being piloted with 10 banks, including the largest private and public sector banks.

NBBL is also said to have started working with five to six payment aggregators under the pilot that will be integrated onto the platform by the end of this month.

“While IMPS, RTGS and NEFT are channel agnostic, UPI (unified payments interface) payments only work on mobile channels. NPCI now wants to popularise its IMPS product as well, which is why BBPL has been allowed to provide an interoperable platform for internet banking where users won’t need UPI or card transactions,” a senior industry official said.

“The pilot has already started and the experience on IMPS has been good. The objective is to popularise more avenues of payments so that not all eggs are in the one UPI basket from a systemic safety point of view,” the official added.

Netbanking 2.0 will bring the flavour of UPI to netbanking by redirecting customers to the mobile app of their bank on the phone for executing payments. NBBL is also planning to use QR codes to increase ease of transaction.