Good morning [%first_name |Dear Reader%],

What’s great about writing a newsletter is that it allows us writers to share interesting conversations we have with sources, well before the subject of the conversation becomes news. 

On a routine catch-up with an executive at a leading payments platform recently, I asked them what’s been keeping them busy these days. They told me there was one product that pretty much every payments company is scampering to launch before the end of this year. 

Something that combines the ubiquity of the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) with the convenience of a mobile wallet. 

A UPI Lite product.

What the UPI wallet will look like

In March this year, the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) released a circular introducing the UPI Lite concept, an on-device wallet on an UPI app. The NPCI, which launched and operates the UPI, is seeking to achieve a two-fold objective with the UPI Lite. 

First, it wants to reduce the toll that UPI transactions are taking on banks’ payments infrastructure by reducing the number of hops in the process.