National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) organized a UPI Hackathon in association with the Indian Software Product Industry Roundtable (iSPIRIT). NPCI hopes the Hackathon will provide a platform for start-ups/developers community to accelerate innovations in payments arena. Nandan Nilekani, honorary advisor to NPCI, Balachandran M, chairman and A.P. Hota, MD and CEO, NPCI, together launched the Hackathon. Over 300 participants comprising technical team of banks, payments banks and payment solution developer organizations participated in the Hackathon. Hota said NPCI would support banks and solution providers to develop solutions based on the Application Programming Interface (APIs) made available by NPCI. The Hackathon will be conducted in multiple tracks primarily for two categories – software based problem solving – online or onsite event version – and workshop format to solve a real life problem that is plaguing the industry. Participants can use the API provided in the sandbox (set of rules that programmers need to use) to develop products/services to generate multiple solution options for each of the perspectives. An eminent panel of jury from iSPIRT and NPCI will evaluate the submissions. UPI is the next generation payment system and it has the potential to revolutionize retail payments in India. A key feature of UPI is that it would provide interoperable and instant payments driven over the mobile platform. Besides that a customer will be able to make payments by providing just a single identifier like Aadhaar number or a virtual address.
