The NFC (Near Field Communication) concept has revolutionized payments as it involves the most minimal contact and takes under 3 to 4 seconds essentially.
Google Pay India is soon going to enable NFC payments via its mobile app.
The introduction of this feature will remove the need to scan a QR code entirely.
The concept of NFC is slowly gaining traction in India, but it is not as popular as in other countries. This new technology for UPI payments will work similarly to that of regular NFC payments.
However, to utilize this feature, the user will have to be operating an NFC-compatible smartphone. Although there are a wide variety of smartphones in the market that support NFC, they usually belong to premium smartphones.
HOW DOES IT WORK?
Once the user has a Google pay account registered in India and a compatible phone, they will need to tap or hold their device close to the vendor’s NFC terminal, and this directly opens the Google Pay app on their device.
After this, the transaction amount must be entered along with the UPI pin to authenticate the transaction.
At present, only the PoS (Point of Sale) terminals manufactured by Pine Lab Terminals will support Google Pay UPI NFC, but with time, the range of supported terminals will also increase.
At present, Google Pay’s fellow competitors have not introduced or made any plans about enabling an NFC feature in the UPI space. The feature will be released soon, but there is no exact date as of yet. The NFC feature will be rolled out to Android users first. There is no clarity yet concerning iOS users.
Also Read: OnePlus to come out with their own Payments interface.