The expanded form of UPI is
Unified Payment Interface
UPI is the Unified Payments Interface — option 3.
What it is. A real-time payment system developed by the National Payments Corporation of India and launched in 2016. Its central idea is in its name: it unifies many bank accounts into a single mobile application and provides a common interface, so that a payment can be made from any account to any account without either party knowing the other’s bank details.
| Feature | Detail |
|---|---|
| Built by | NPCI, an umbrella organisation set up by the RBI and the Indian Banks’ Association |
| Launched | 2016 |
| Address | A Virtual Payment Address such as name@bank, so the account number need not be shared |
| Availability | 24 hours a day, every day of the year, including holidays |
| Cost | No charge to the user for person-to-person transfers |
Why it succeeded. Three things came together — the spread of cheap smartphones and cheap data, the Jan Dhan accounts that gave hundreds of millions of people a bank account, and Aadhaar for identity. The combination is often called the JAM trinity. UPI now handles well over a thousand crore transactions a month, more than any other real-time payment system in the world, and it has been extended to Singapore, the UAE, France, Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka and Mauritius among others.
Other NPCI systems worth knowing: RuPay cards, IMPS for immediate transfers, NACH for bulk payments, AePS for Aadhaar-enabled banking, BHIM as the reference UPI app, and FASTag for tolls.
How to read such a question. Three of the options are invented phrases built from plausible words. The giveaway is the last word: an interface is a precise technical term for a common standard through which different systems talk to one another, which is exactly what UPI is; “initiation” and “inception” describe nothing.
Hence, the answer is Unified Payment Interface.
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