HDFC Bank goes live on 'Rupay Credit on UPI' feature for customers

HDFC Bank is live on ‘RuPay credit card on UPI’ feature, becoming the first private sector bank to take up a service that allows customers to use RuPay credit cards on UPI with BHIM and other UPI-enabled apps.

HDFC Bank RuPay credit cards can be linked to a UPI identity for secure payment transactions, the bank said on Thursday. Merchants will benefit from increased consumption.

Punjab National Bank, Union Bank of India, and Indian Bank, which are all state owned, use the UPI feature. HDFC Bank, India’s largest credit card issuer, is the fourth to come on board.

“We believe linking RuPay Credit Card on UPI will be a game-changer for the ecosystem and will give impetus to the adoption of UPI across businesses with multiple use cases. It will provide a seamless, digitally enabled credit card lifecycle experience to the customers and will enable consumers to make QR-based, e-commerce payments using the credit card on UPI which will fuel further economic growth,” said Praveena Rai, chief operating officer, National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), which developed UPI.

Business Standard reported earlier that other major credit card issuers, including SBI Card, ICICI Bank, and Axis Bank, are likely to go live on this feature very soon. Once the major card issuers go live on the ecosystem, the daily transaction will get a boost, which till a couple of months ago stood at 50 lakh a day.

In June last year, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) allowed linking of credit cards to UPI, which was used as a “pay now” facility till ten. The linking is aimed at providing additional convenience to users and enhancing the scope of digital payments. The idea behind this move is to expand the size of the merchant base that accepts credit card payments.

Roughly 2-4 million merchants accept credit cards and more than 50 million accept UPI payments. The new feature looks to include these 50 million UPI merchants in the formal credit economy.