UPI

The National Unified USSD Platform (NUUP) lets you use UPI by dialling *99#, without having to install a proprietary app.

The service is run by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), the government-backed private company that also operates the UPI ecosystem itself.

*99# and BHIM

Besides NUUP, NPCI also operates BHIM which is a proprietary app for Android smartphones. The two are linked in the sense that dialling *99# is essentially a different way of accessing your BHIM account. Practically, this means that if you run into issues setting up UPI payments with *99#, you can often work around this by borrowing a proprietary Android phone from someone and installing BHIM on that to link your bank and set up UPI payments. Once done, you can uninstall the app and make payments directly via *99#.

Provider support

While NUUP is theoretically supposed to work on all USSD supporting carriers in India (all the provider apart from Jio), the service is not very well maintained and keeps going down, or, in some cases, doesn't work at all.

Providers known to work

• Airtel
• Vi

Providers known not to work

• BSNL
• Jio

Bank support

The NPCI lists 103 banks supporting *99# payments. However, each of them has their own slightly different interface to the service, and not all of them work seamlessly.

This section provides crowdsourced information on which banks have been known to work or not, as experienced by the FSCI community.

Banks known to work

• City Union Bank
• Federal Bank
• Indian Bank

Banks known not to work

• ICICI (external application down)
• India Post Payments Bank (does not show up as a choice though it is listed as supported on the NPCI website)