Amazon has released the Amazon Pay UPI service for Android phones, which will allow users to make payments using the Amazon Pay UPI ID when they shop on Amazon.in. The Unified Payments Interface (UPI) was developed by the developed by National Payments Corporation of India and launched two years ago. The UPI is a method for transferring funds between two different bank accounts, without the need for any credit or debit card.
At present, Amazon is only offering this UPI functionality to Android users. In fact, the timing is quite interesting, considering the fact that Amazon will have to do the know your customer (KYC) verifications for every user of the Pay Wallet. Unless users complete the Full KYC process, they will not be able to load money to the wallet, once they complete one year from when they signed up to use the wallet.
Last month, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) issued a set of regulations which come into effect from March. Till now, e-wallets and digital wallets such as Paytm, Freecharge, Mobikwik and Amazon Pay offered users the option of partial KYC, which meant submitting an identity document as proof and confirming that with a one-time password authentication using your mobile number. Now however, the new guidelines mandate that each mobile wallet company has to physically verify the credentials of each of its users, which means a physical verification of the identification documents is mandatory.
It will be interesting to see if Amazon expands the UPI functionality to other users too, such as on the Apple iPhone. At present, Amazon is partnering with Axis Bank to generate UPI IDs for users who wish to sign up.
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