NCPI is planning to merge UPI QR codes with BharatQR

The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) is working on merging BharatQR along with Unified Payments Interface (UPI). The organisation launched UPI for merchants leveraging trends such as increasing smartphone adoption and deeper penetration of mobile data. UPI will enable users to perform instant push and pull transactions seamlessly.

BharatQR , on the other hand, was launched around February end for the consumers. This platform was touted as world’s first interoperable payment acceptance solution to move towards less-cash economy at an “insignificant cost”, according to industry members. Over the past few months, the government has been aggressively pushing for higher usage of digital payment mechanisms, including launching Bhim app and increasing penetration of PoS machines. Developed by National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), Mastercard, and Visa, BharatQR code would require merchants to only display one QR code instead of multiple ones.

The interesting thing here is that both UPI and BharatQR generate QR codes for the entire system to function seamlessly without the need for internet. The UPI system would generate a one-time dynamic QR code that would show all the details required for a transaction on the payment app. UPI, on the other hand, generated both static and dynamic QR codes as detailed by Medianama in their report. During transactions using dynamic QR codes, the users would need to enter the amount of transaction at the end of the transaction while during dynamic QR cores, all the details of the transaction are already entered.

The problem about both the systems is that the QR codes generated by the systems are not interoperable and merchants need to place a separate static QR code generated by UPI system along with the static QR codes generated by BharatQR. Dilip Asbe, the CEO of NPCI also pointed out that the solutions where the users have to insert the amount of transaction usually ends up in an error and the organisation does not want the errors to happen. One important thing to note here is that the NPCI is still not talking about adding other QR based mobile wallets, including Paytm and MobiKwik.