India has plans to use voice-based and offline payments to close the digital divide between rural areas and cities, according to a report by The Financial Times (FT).

The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), an umbrella organisation for operating retail payments and settlement systems, describes India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) as a system that powers multiple bank accounts into a single mobile application merging "several banking features, seamless fund routing and merchant payments into one hood".

The digital payments system, which now has around 350 million users, also provides “Peer to Peer” collect requests which can be scheduled and paid as required.

The FT said that while the network has grown in popularity since its launch in 2016, the system has found difficulty reaching remote areas and poorer communities due to a lack of internet access and lower literacy levels.

Earlier this month, the Reserve Bank of India revealed it would explore conversational payments, whereby users of the UPI system can use their voice to make transfer instructions on their mobile phones, said the report.

These instructions would then be processed using AI-powered speech recognition.

Dilip Asbe, head of the NPCI, told The FT that the voice-activated system will be focussed on areas located outside of the country's biggest cities.

“What they do is help us to expand and create a new use case to reach out to more users and more merchants,” he continued.

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