Situation

This is a story that dates back to 2016 when the payment renaissance of India
began due to demonetization and as we all saw 86 % of India's cash was
declared invalid overnight but all thanks to the internet and mobile penetration
Paytm came as a savior and helped us transfer money even to the smallest
vendor through a QR code and as usual with such a huge untapped market
several other payment gateways started offering cashback to onboard as many
merchants and customers as possible.

While most of us very easily became the adopters of this digital payment system
behind the scenes an IIT Delhi student named Shashvat Nakrani noticed three
critical problems in the system

Problem identification

1. Since each payment app needed a different QR code, when we went to a

Kirana/Grocery store at the time of making the payment it would turn out
that the shopkeeper only had PayTm while we had migrated to GooglePay
or PhonePe so obviously the shopkeeper would then insist that we make
the payment in cash and this defeated the entire purpose of going cashless.
2. While payment apps charged zero % fee on transactions for customers
like you and me for merchants there was not a single wallet that was
taking less than 1.5% in commissions.
So, if you bought groceries worth 500 rupees the profit of the vendor
itself is just 50 to 75 rupees and in that also 1.5 percent of the purchase
value which is 7.5 rupees used to go to the payment gateways as
commissions.
3. Lastly, the awareness of UPI system which was practically free, was very
very less and that's when it struck him that there has to be some way of
leveraging UPI to remove all charges on payments.