Delegated payments on Unified Payments Interface (UPI) – where a user can allow his/her children or others to undertake transactions from his/her UPI-linked account – is the next big bet for all the major payment applications looking to attract new users.

Amazon Pay, Google Pay, and Bharat Interface for Money (Bhim), operated by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), are testing a feature called UPI Circles with a closed user group and will go live in a few months.

According to reports, PhonePe, the largest third-party application on UPI, is also testing the product.

This feature can be used extensively by senior citizens, and children, especially in households where there is one bank account. It will be enabled within a trusted network,” said Vikas Bansal, chief executive officer of Amazon Pay.
Some possible use cases listed on the NPCI site include junior college students making cash-free payments using their parents’ UPI accounts, housemaids shopping on behalf of their employers, and drivers filling fuel on behalf of car owners.

Given the fraud happening on digital payments and the vulnerability of children and elderly members of the family, UPI Circle will keep control over the product in the hands of the primary account holder, according to reports.

According to industry sources, this feature, which requires the primary user to authenticate each transaction of a secondary user, is expected to be more widely adopted.

As NPCI seeks to broaden the base of users active in the UPI, young consumers and seniors have been on its radar for some time, and NPCI is looking beyond the 300 million UPI users to bring more active users to the platform.