22
Mar
Offline digital payment appears to be fundamentally the opposite of online digital payment. However, the regulator is pushing for it to ensure that digitization reaches the last mile in rural India. At a live-streamed ceremony, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) announced the release of Unified Payments Interface (UPI) on feature phones, bringing the service to hundreds of millions of feature phone users. Owners of feature phones will be capable of making UPI transactions even without internet access thanks to a technology called UPI123Pay. Significantly, feature phones are simple phones that only support voice calling and text messaging capabilities. These…