Banking & Financial Awareness Quiz: NPCI, UPI and RuPay

NPCI was incorporated in 2008 as a not for profit company under Section 25 of the Companies Act, 1956 to act as the umbrella organisation for all retail payment systems in India, and it began by taking over the National Financial Switch the following year.

NPCI was set up on the initiative of the Reserve Bank of India together with the Indian Banks Association, and ten core promoter banks held its first shareholding, which is why it is owned by the banking industry rather than by the government.

UPI was launched by NPCI in 2016, and the BHIM application followed in December of the same year, which is why 2016 is the single most asked year in this topic.

The Immediate Payment Service, launched in 2010, already moved money between banks instantly at every hour, and UPI uses that rail while adding the virtual payment address, interoperable applications and single click authentication.

A virtual payment address takes the form of a name followed by a bank handle and acts as a pointer to the underlying account, so a payment can be made or collected without revealing the account number or the branch code.

RuPay was launched by NPCI in 2012 so that debit and credit card transactions between Indian cardholders and Indian merchants are authorised and settled within the country instead of being switched abroad, and its name joins Rupee with Payment.

BHIM stands for Bharat Interface for Money, and the acronym was chosen in honour of Dr Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, the chairman of the drafting committee of the Constitution and a trained economist.

Under this Act no person may commence or operate a payment system in India without authorisation from the Reserve Bank, and it created the Board for Regulation and Supervision of Payment and Settlement Systems within the RBI.

A FASTag is an RFID sticker on the windscreen which a reader at the toll plaza identifies from a distance, so the toll is debited from the linked account or wallet without the vehicle stopping; the programme is run by NPCI as National Electronic Toll Collection.

NACH is the bulk payment system for many credits or debits at once, such as salary, pension, dividend, subsidy and direct benefit transfer on the credit side and loan instalments, insurance premiums and utility bills on the debit side, and it took over the work of the older ECS with…