‘Paytm UPI LITE Payments Cannot Fail’

India’s homegrown Paytm Payments Bank on Friday announced that it is currently the only platform to exclusively offer UPI LITE payments, which enables faster real-time transactions with a single tap on the Paytm app without the need to enter a PIN.

The UPI Lite payments can include transactions up to Rs 200 in value and these transactions cannot fail, said Paytm. These payments can be made by users without the need of entering a PIN for each payment. 

Speaking to BW Businessworld, Paytm Senior VP Narendra Yadav said, “Primarily, users faced three problems: 1) Even when they made small value payments, they had to enter a PIN; 2) Many banks were not available at peak times, because of overload of demand – transactions often failed; 3) Bank passbooks get cluttered by small UPI payments.”

Paytm says UPI LITE solves all these three issues.

A Paytm UPI LITE user can make payments quick and seamless transactions of value up to Rs 200 at a time, provided they set aside Rs 2,000 for UPI LITE. Users can add Rs 2,000 twice in a day to UPI LITE, making the cumulative daily usage up to Rs 4,000. 

UPI LITE also declutters the bank passbook of small value transactions, as these payments would now only show in the Paytm balance and history section and not in the bank passbook. Instead, the passbook would only reflect the total added amount to UPI LITE.

Since the amount is already allocated to UPI LITE, it eliminates the possibility of the transaction failing due to the unavailability of a bank – a persistent issue every UPI user faces today.

UPI LITE was designed by National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) and was launched by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) last year.

“With more than 50 per cent of transactions through UPI below Rs 200, UPI LITE will successfully provide a distributed way of authorising low value transactions, moving them away from core banking. This shall further improve the success rate of transactions, enhancing the user experience, and taking us one more step closer to processing a billion transactions a day on the UPI platform,” said Praveena Rai, COO, NPCI.

Currently, nine banks support Paytm UPI LITE including Canara Bank, Central Bank of India, HDFC Bank, Indian Bank, Kotak Mahindra Bank, Punjab National Bank, State Bank of India, Union Bank of India, and Utkarsh Small Finance Bank.

BW Businessworld asked Paytm the thought-process behind launching UPI LITE first on its platform. “We have decided that we are going to leverage our technology, cross-capabilities and launch every product ahead of anyone else in the market,” explained Paytm’s Narendra Yadav.

Paytm’s net loss halved year-on-year (YoY) Rs 392 crore in Q3 FY23 and revenue from operations increased by 41 per cent on a YoY to Rs 2,062 crore.