PhonePe has launched UPI 123Pay on feature phones in India, letting people send money and pay merchants without an internet connection. The company announced it on 31 August, and says it is the first major third-party application provider to extend UPI to what it puts at more than 200 million feature phone users in the country. The app comes pre-bundled on Nokia, HMD, Lava International and itel devices, with more manufacturers to follow.
How PhonePe UPI 123Pay works without the internet
The whole thing runs on SMS rather than a data connection. PhonePe says the architecture is built to work in areas with patchy 2G coverage, which is the point of the exercise. A feature phone in a village with one bar of signal can still complete a transaction.
You can send money to a mobile number or a UPI ID, and pay merchants the same way. Phones with a camera can also scan QR codes. Beyond payments, the app handles balance checks and transaction history. PhonePe says bill payments, recharges and Aadhaar-based onboarding are coming later.
Setup does not need a smartphone. You open the pre-installed app, accept the terms, pick your bank, enter the last six digits of your debit card and its expiry date, then set a UPI PIN. PhonePe has also added a voice helpline that answers in English and 12 Indian languages to walk people through activation.
Which feature phones support it
HMD India has announced its own list of supported handsets, reported by FoneArena. These are the models that carry it now.
- HMD — HMD 105 2G, HMD 110 2G
- Nokia — Nokia 105 Classic, Nokia 105 Single SIM, Nokia 105 Dual SIM, Nokia 106, Nokia 123 Shield
QR scanning only works on the models with a camera. On the rest, you are limited to mobile number and UPI ID transfers. HMD says more of its devices will get support.
The debit card requirement is the catch
Registration hinges on having a debit card. That is a real barrier for exactly the group this is aimed at, because a bank account and a debit card are not the same thing, and plenty of rural account holders have one without the other. PhonePe’s promised Aadhaar-based onboarding would remove that step, but it is not here yet.
It is worth being clear-eyed about the other side of this too. Sameer Nigam, Founder and CEO of PhonePe, framed the launch in the company’s release this way:
“Bringing UPI to feature phones through PhonePe UPI 123Pay extends the benefits of digital payments beyond smartphones to every corner of the country.”
The same release names the commercial goal: onboarding the next 300 million users. Financial inclusion and customer acquisition happen to point the same direction here, which is fine, but an app that arrives on the handset by commercial arrangement rather than by your choice is still exactly that. And once Aadhaar onboarding arrives, activating a payment app on a basic phone will mean handing over biometric-linked identity data on a device with no meaningful privacy controls.
For the millions of people who currently cannot pay digitally at all, none of that outweighs the benefit. It is just worth knowing what the trade is.
Sources: FoneArena
