Open Adopts UPI 2.0 and Launches Recurrent Payments for Small Businesses

Fintech startup Open today announced that it is rolling out UPI AutoPay feature to its 650000+ small businesses that use its business banking platform. This will enable a wide range of small businesses like freelancers, startups, SMEs to collect recurring payments from their customers for various needs.

Open offers a whole suite of payment tools for small businesses to collect and send payments combined with automated accounting and bookkeeping, expense management and automate their finances effectively. The UPI AutoPay feature automates collections of regular payments, thereby reducing the time a small business would spend to manually follow up for the same. With this, SaaS platforms can easily collect subscription payments, schools, tutors & gyms to collect fees, NGOs to collect donations using UPI.

The UPI Autopay was launched by NPCI in July 2020 with a view to provide a better user experience and transparency to recurring payments. According to a recent RBI Settlement Report, UPI registered 1 billion transactions amounting to Rs 191,986.9 crore in the first 15 days of October.

Founded in 2017, Open has already grown to over 650,000 SMEs and processes over USD 15 billion in annualised transactions. The platform also adds over 45,000 SMEs every month, making it the fastest growing SME focused business banking platform globally.

Commenting on this, Anish Achuthan, Co-founder & CEO, Open Financial Technologies Pvt. Ltd said, “Recurring payments has been a big pain point for small businesses. At a time when small businesses are moving to digital payments due to the pandemic, enabling UPI AutoPay helps small businesses to automate collection, stay safe and focus on growing their business rather than worry on tracking receivables.”

Praveena Rai, COO, National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) said, “We are delighted to collaborate with Open Financial Technologies and facilitate the adoption of UPI AutoPay. We believe with the introduction this functionality, SMEs will benefit immensely as it will not only save their time and reduce manual efforts but also make their business transactions automated and secure. This unique auto debit feature on UPI, will also help small businesses manage their business operations and expenses seamlessly. We are confident that it will act as an empowering agent for SMEs to be on-boarded into business automation process backed up with an extra layer of convenience and safety. We are also pleased to witness UPI AutoPay increasingly becoming the preferred choice for both customers and merchants thereby transforming the way recurring transactions were being perceived.”