NPCI planning to let users save UPI IDs at merchant checkouts

The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) is planning to enable customers to save their favoured or most-used Unified Payments Interface (UPI) ID on popular merchant websites, according to three people in the know.

Currently a customer while checking out on an ecommerce site typically selects the UPI app and then the specific account through which he or she intends to pay. Once the customer locks the favoured UPI ID, one step in the payment flow can be bypassed, the people said.

“NPCI is toying with this idea, which is being referred to as UPI Meta. It has not been officially launched or published as a protocol yet, but NPCI officials have already discussed this with industry executives,” said one of the people.

Before this product can be launched, NPCI will need to seek clearance from the Reserve Bank of India, which is yet to be done, the person added.

NPCI did not respond to queries.

This will put UPI at par with online card payments. Under directives from the RBI, payment gateways are allowed to tokenise the card, through which consumers do not have to input the card details every time they pay at a website.

If the feature goes live, consumers can save their UPI ID, referred to as the UPI handle, on popular merchant sites like ecommerce platforms, travel booking applications, food delivery apps and quick commerce platforms which they use regularly. This way consumers will not have to input their UPI ID or select the UPI application every time they undertake a transaction, thereby improving customer convenience and increasing transaction success rates.

Fears of concentration risk

While the product update is still at a nascent stage, multiple industry insiders raised concerns that such a feature would inadvertently help large UPI third party applications like PhonePe and Google Pay.

ET has learnt that discussions have been held between UPI apps and NPCI on the matter and the issues around concentration risk were raised. The meetings were conducted via the Payments Council of India, the representative body for payment companies, two people said.

The council did not respond to an email seeking comment.

One of the people who attended the meeting told ET that the update will be such that once a large merchant has already taken consent via one particular payment gateway, if the merchant wishes to process any transaction via any other payment gateway, an explicit consent will have to be taken again.

“This will definitely benefit the large payment apps who will be the first ones to take consent from the customers,” said the person.

The person said while success rates on UPI payments will improve after the move, it will be difficult for smaller UPI apps to establish themselves in the payment sweepstakes. Smaller UPI apps are using incentives, offers and cashbacks to entice customers, even as the large ones have almost become default UPI check out apps.

NPCI has been encouraging smaller UPI apps like Cred, Navi, Super.Money and Jupiter to scale up their customer acquisition strategies and grab a sizable chunk of the UPI payments, so the concentration risk building up on PhonePe and Google Pay is reduced. Currently, more than 80% of UPI payments are processed through these two payment majors.

Cred is pushing the adoption of Cred UPI to its users and Flipkart-backed Super.Money is also offering incentives to customers.

Competition with cards

A senior banker in the know said the thinking at NPCI is that this will help UPI IDs remain competitive with cards, which are allowed to be tokenised currently.

“Large payment aggregators are encouraging consumers to tokenise their cards, while this is an RBI mandate, it is also being done to encourage consumers to use their cards more since banks and payment companies generate revenue on card payments,” the banker said.

With UPI being free, large apps and banks are not making any money by processing UPI transactions.

“The matter has been discussed with NPCI and they also understand the risks involved, but NPCI is coming from the point where they want to push UPI payments further and make it the default transaction mode for consumers,” the first person cited in the story said.

ET reported on April 7 how the growth rate on UPI has slowed down to around 36% during 2025-24 from more than 50% in the two previous years. NPCI chief executive officer Dilip Asbe has also spoken about how the platform is trying to expand the number of users on UPI from around 300 million currently to more than 500 million.