Google Play in India gets UPI Autopay option for subscription-based payments

Google has introduced UPI Autopay option for Google Play users in India. This option can be used for all subscription-based payments going forward.

The UPI Autopay feature is part of the UPI 2.0 feature set by the National Payments Corporation of India, and enables using the popular UPI payment system for recurring payments as well using any of the supported UPI apps. Users will have to authorize the payment for the first month of their new subscription and future payments will be deducted automatically.

Saurabh Agarwal, Head of Google Play Retail & Payments Activation - India, Vietnam, Australia & New Zealand said, “We are always looking at adding popular and effective forms of payment around the world to ensure people can pay for apps and in-app content conveniently. With the introduction of UPI Autopay on the platform, we aim to extend the convenience of UPI to subscription-based purchases, helping many more people access helpful and delightful services – while enabling local developers to grow their subscription-based businesses on Google Play.”

The new UPI Autopay option comes hot on the heels of the new Reserve Bank of India guidelines for recurring payments through credit cards, which now requires banks to intimate users of an upcoming recurring payment two days in advance.

This also resulted in stored credit card information being removed from merchants on October 1 had the user not made a payment before September 30. This means a lot of users are yet to setup their payment method again for services like Google Play and can now choose to use UPI Autopay instead of their credit cards.