The problem Paisa Vasool solves

Sharing subscriptions like Netflix friends is not seamless. Collect payments online and reconciling them manually using Apps still requires us to manually confirm payments, and APIs/SDKs by PSPs are expensive.

Our hack allows you to consolidate your UPI requests for free!

The app

To demonstrate the hack for this hackathon, we decided to concentrate our efforts
to Splitting Recurring Payments such as those for
Netflix/Amazon Prime/Hotstar/Spotify etc. Although, our
hack can be extended to any kind of collect requests.

A user can create groups on our app and enter his friends contact details
and instantly get reconciliations from our app when he receives payments.

Our hack allows you to consolidate your UPI requests for free!

• Daily UPI requests are limited by PSP apps like Google Pay.
  • You can request upto 5 times on Google Pay a day
  • New users can't be requested more than once a day
• Payment API's are expensive
  • Costs (2% per transaction) are added onto the consumers
• You need to check your Bank transaction details and reconcile manually without a PSP
• Apps like Paisa Vasool are impossible on top of UPI as of today

Our hack allows payers to pay with any VPA.

• No need to ask your user to be on a specific UPI app
• No need for payee to pay from his own account (parents/friends can pay on behalf)

Instant reconcilation

• We process the transacation as soon as we get the bank SMS
• Users don't need to check their bank details

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge was to figure out a way to solve these issues:

• How to identify a transaction
• How to not need the payers VPA

We figured out that:

• The identifier can be embedded in the paisa value
• We can read SMS to get the amount and parse the transaction ID.
• Parsing only relevant SMS and discarding them immediately after processing to maintain user's privacy was something we were adamant about and took extra efforts to achieve that.

Detailed technical flow

• User installs our app and gives read permission for SMS to our app.
  • Our app is open source and only sends SMS with UPI VPAs to our server
• They create a collect request in the UI with the amount and users, and create a group for recurring weekly/monthly transactions.
  • User adds his clients/friends to the group using mobile number and/or email
    • These are saved for the future
• The collect request is then processed by the server
  • UPI link (which can be embedded in SMS/Whatsapp/Telegram) is created using https://upi.link/ API - It is sent to all the clients/friends with appropriate amount that has been hacked to include the transaction identifier in the amount paisa value.
• The app waits for SMS from the bank of the User, which includes the amount (plus paisa value identifier) inside it.
  • On receiving the SMS, we change the state of the pending transaction to complete.
• The user can check the state and see all his transactions from our app.