Amazon Pay just got a big boost in the digital payments space. Amazon has now enabled the person-to-person, also known as P2P, instant money transfers on Amazon Pay. This means Amazon Pay users can now make bank to bank transactions through the unified payments interface (UPI) from the Amazon app. However, you will only be able to use this at the moment if you use an Android smartphone.
Amazon does envision a variety of usage scenarios where the P2P instant payments via UPI could be relevant. For instance, you can now use Amazon Pay to pay your share of the bill when you step out for a meal with friends, make instant money transfers to a friend or family member’s bank account, pay off bills and subscriptions as well as make payments at physical stores that support the UPI payments.
“Our goal is to make Amazon Pay the most trusted, convenient and rewarding way to pay for our customers. The customers trust their Amazon app and we continue to expand payment use cases directly on the app. With this launch, we have the largest selection of shopping and payment use cases on the Amazon Android app which provides added convenience and control to our customers,” says Vikas Bansal, Director, Amazon Pay.
Setting up Amazon Pay UPI on your phone is quite simple. Your phone number is verified the first time you wish to set this up, and the UPI gateway will detect all the available bank accounts linked with your phone number. At this point, you will be able to enable and verify which one you wish to use as the UPI payment method on Amazon Pay.
When you need to make a payment using Amazon Pay, you can select a contact from your phone’s address book and proceed. The Amazon Pay platform will automatically detect if the contact you wish to make the payment to is also registered on Amazon Pay UPI, and will initiate the transfer. “If the contact is not registered for Amazon Pay UPI, the customer has the option to pay using any another BHIM UPI ID or contact’s bank account,” confirms Amazon.
Amazon says that all P2P payments are secured through multi factor authentication, including the customer’s phone, SIM card details, and unique UPI PIN. The UPI regulated by the Reserve Bank of India, and is a part of the government's push for digital payments. UPI's most used feature is for instant transfer of funds between bank accounts using a smartphone. Amazon had launched the Amazon Pay UPI in India in February.
At present, the P2P instant payments feature via UPI is available only on the Android app for Amazon Shopping in India. At present, iPhone users do not have access to this feature, and Amazon hasn’t really communicated a timeline for if and when that might happen. Also, the entire gamut of Amazon Pay services are available within the Amazon Shopping app, though we feel that at some point, Amazon Pay might deserve an app of its own.
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