Information circulating the internet suggests that Jio Phone users have started receiving Jio Pay with Unified Payments Interface (UPI) support. The report says that Jio Pay is available to a handful of users only and has been in testing for over a year. The Jio Phone which launched in 2017 brought with it NFC and Jio has been working with National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) to enable proprietary payments on the feature phone.
At India Mobile Congress 2017, Digit got a chance to experience NFC enabled payment on the Jio Phone. The demo that Jio game us showed how a user could purchase a bus ticket by simply using his/her phone to make the payment for the journey. NFC was used to complete the transaction. You can watch the demo in the video below.
UPI based Jio Pay on the Jio Phone could let users conduct transactions like tap & pay, send and receive money, recharge, and more. According to BGR India, “Jio Pay for JioPhone has been built over a tokenization platform, and it uses ‘Tap and Pay’ contactless payment through NFC in any NFC enabled POS machine. As of now Jio has onboard Axis, ICICI, HDFC, Standard Chartered, IndusInd, SBI, Kotak, YesBank, RBL Bank. It is also been said that both Credit and Debit cards (Mastercard and VISA) of these banks can be tokenized and used for payment.”
When Jio launched the NFC enabled Jio Phone in 2017, we got our hands on it and you can check out our review of the device here.
In other Jio news, Reliance has launched the JioMart app for Android and iOS. JioMart is all set to take on online retail giants such as Amazon, Flipkart, Grofers and more and the service is currently live in over 200 cities. The JioMart Android app has been downloaded by over 100,000 users since it went live and on the Apple App Store, it is already the second-most-popular app in the shopping category. You can read more about the app here.