India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) is all set to get its ‘Mutual Fund Sahi Hai’ moment. Awareness campaigns and adoption drives for popular payments interface is set to flood India’s media space as regulators and government bodies such as the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), MeitY and Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) will collaborate with industry players to bring about a behavioural change in how Indians transact and make UPI a household name.
NPCI, in association with leading banks and payment companies, has hired global advertising agency Ogilvy and Mathers for a nationwide campaign to drive adoption of the popular fund transfer interface. The UPI, which is a real time fund transfer interface, has significantly scaled since its launch in August 2016 when 92,000 transactions worth 3.1 crore were processed on the NPCI operated platform to over 1.3 billion transactions worth 2.16 trillion in January 2020.
“The ‘UPI Chalta Hai’ campaign is aimed to guide users towards the right usage of UPI and help create a habitual change, use of UPI in their daily life,” NPCI said in a note shared with ET. “The campaign also focuses on safety aspects while transacting on UPI enabled apps.” In the process a microsite UPIChalega.com has also been setup where users can access information about live banks and third-party apps on the interface as well as social feeds among other information on safety and redressal mechanisms in case of frauds.
“This is possibly the first time that banking, payments and fintech players are coming together with NPCI to promote safe usage of UPI via a massive multi-media campaign that aims to provoke interest as well as educate in an engaging manner,” said Karthi Marshan, chairman of the Financial Literacy and Awareness Campaign Committee and chief marketing officer, Kotak Mahindra Group.
Meanwhile, Data Security Council of India (DSCI) in partnership with Google India and MeitY early last year launched a multilingual awareness campaign called the Digital Payments Abhiyan to promote financial safety on internet. Leading industry players such as HDFC Bank, SBI, Visa, Paytm, MasterCard and NABARD are part of the outreach programme which till January has made 21 million unique impressions, a DSCI spokesperson said.
“The campaign is supported in seven different languages with collaborations from leading industry participants,” ” the spokesperson said. “We plan on making 43 million impressions for the by the end of February in a bid to promote healthy internet behaviour and drastically reduce cases of consumer frauds which will help drive UPI adoption even further,” the spokesperson said.
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