UPI, AA and ONDC will reorder Indian supply chain: Nandan Nilekani

Nilekani was speaking at the launch of new UPI solutions by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) during the Global Fintech Fest.

The lending and payments ecosystem, he said, will benefit from the new solutions being rolled out and that will help a larger share of the population join the digital transaction ecosystem.

This combination of credit enabled through UPI, AA and ONDC will fundamentally reorder the supply chain to make it more efficient, and easier to provide products and services to everybody, he said.

ONDC will have a big impact on ecommerce by allowing retailers, suppliers and logistics companies to engage with each other and will, in turn, impact hyperlocal commerce and big commerce, Nilekani added.

NPCI launched solutions like RuPay Credit Card on UPI, UPI LITE, and Bharat BillPay Cross-Border Bill Payments.

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Nilekani said this would expand the reach of the digital stack across the country.

“Today, we have about 260 million people using UPI. With the launch of the offline UPI, I think we can add another 500 million people to the payment system,” he said.

This will also expand the base of the 150-million-odd users who use the Aadhaar-enabled Payment System (AEPS), he said.

“We have an existing credit product like Rupay, and by making it available on UPI, it will open up more forms of credit on UPI, and, therefore, there will be new native abilities on UPI, like BNPL (buy now and pay later), and so on,” he added.

Giving the 400 million odd UPI users access to native credit products like BNPL will democratize the consumer use of credit in a healthy way using data, Nilekani said.

The technology infrastructure of NPCI is among the most advanced anywhere in the world and has been built entirely on an open source stack at very low cost using commodity hardware, and built for scale.

“And that infrastructure is now being reapplied to other applications. They have IMPS (Immediate Payment Service) and BBPS (Bharat Bill Payments Service). So, the underlying core infrastructure is now being standardized by NPCI, which is a phenomenal technical achievement,” he added.