| I tell about UPI to my friends in Western countries, When they tell how easy and seamless Apple Pay has made their payments, they're often surprised that such system exists here. One can download GPay or plethora of other apps to setup UPI to sync with the bank accounts within minutes and conduct transactions. With vernacular support/affordable cellular data, these apps have found its users even among those who have never used a computer in their life to login to their banking portal or used debit card before to conduct any online transactions earlier. Now, what 'I' don't like about it, Extraordinary dependence on 'Mobile Number' for security, RBI(India's central bank) requires personal phone number to be synced with the bank account, so these 'UPI' apps send SMS from the phone at random to 'verify' that it's actually you i.e. if the phone number matches its you. If you are like me, who has the phone in aeroplane mode 24*7 or use cellular on-demand be prepared for transaction failures at best to getting locked out of the UPI apps at worst. Then there is the question of SMS OTP as the backbone of Indian banking infrastructure's 2FA security, we know SIM-Jacking attacks are getting prevalent every passing day, coercing an employee of a Telecom who earns minimum wage is not that difficult and especially since there is zero 'cyber-security' awareness among much of the population; attackers just dupe many of them into giving them the OTP[1]. It's high time banking infrastructure here start supporting hardware tokens or at least TOTP apps and UPI has to hedge its unique id dependence to email id as well. [1]https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/wealth/save/beware-of-t... |
Western countries in your statement is probably mainly USA, as most of Europe has been using contactless payment via NFC for many years.
Apple Pay is effectively just using the phone’s NFC chip instead of that embedded in the debit/credit card, although it does bring one advantage: Because the iPhone has its own authentication system, you’re never asked for PIN code when paying with your phone, whereas paying with a debit/credit card will ask for PIN if the amount is above a certain threshold, or if it hasn’t asked for a long time.
I have been using payment apps in Asia, not India, but Apple Pay is definitely more seamless (or NFC enabled cards), as these only require you to hold them near the terminal, whereas a payment app require first being launched, and then either scanning a QR code and confirming, or bringing up your QR code to have the cashier scan it.
Don’t get me wrong: I am very much a fan of the concept of UPI, I am commenting just to clarify that universal payment interface with third party apps is different than NFC enabled payments, where I think it is really the latter, that your friends in Western countries are describing as seamless.