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As the FT noted in a report last week, while India’s Universal Payments Interface (UPI) is now used by around 350m, it has had trouble breaking into the country’s more rural regions due to spotty internet access and lower levels of literacy. This is why the Reserve Bank of India has recently unveiled a plan for “conversational” payments, allowing UPI users to make verbal transfer instructions on their phones which will be processed using AI-based speech recognition.
“As one might expect, given India’s trailblazing nature, local consumers use more digital shopping features than their counterparts in the United States or the United Kingdom,” PYMNTS wrote last week. “India’s millennial, bridge millennial and Generation Z shoppers have been the country’s early adopters of these digital-first shopping experiences.”
