Yes Bank ties-up with Ultracash Technologies to enable proximity payments based on sound waves

Yes Bank has announced its collaboration with Ultracash Technologies to launch payments processing through sound waves. This partnership will enable Ultracash to issue Yes Bank sponsored mobile wallets and employ YES BANK’s IMPS payments platform to enable processing of instant proximity transactions. Ultracash utilizes a patent-pending technology, where payment data is securely transferred from one device to the other using unique ultra high frequency sound waves. This technology ensures that Ultracash’s ‘Tap and Pay’ works on all devices and doesn’t need any special hardware to make the payment and there is no need of special NFC chips. India currently has over 1 billion mobile connections resulting in 75% market penetration. There are about 200 million estimated smart phone owners in the country. However, the limited internet connectivity is restricting the proliferation of mobile payments. Ultracash’s sound wave technology enables mobile payments to be done without the need for Internet connectivity using any of the options such as bank account and debit/credit cards. In addition, Ultracash will now be issuing Yes Bank branded digital wallets to the consumers to aid quicker, seamless and friction free payments. Ultracash will be riding on the IMPS payments APIs of Yes Bank to allow merchant as well as person to person payments.

This launch is expected to fuel proximity payments in India with the usage of a smartphone as an acquiring instrument for the merchants. Currently, there are only about 1 million POS terminals in the country for a merchant population of over 25 million. Ultracash was launched in Bangalore in August 2015 and has more than 60,000 active app users who have done more than 1.2 lakh transactions amounting to Rs.10 crore in transaction value, says the company. Ultracash is currently present in more than 1000 merchants across various offline and home delivery segments.