PhonePe UPI Circle Feature With Seamless Payment Authorisation Launched in India

PhonePe UPI Circle was launched in India on Tuesday, as a feature that allows a primary user to authorise secondary users to make payments without their own bank account. Developed by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), UPI Circle is designed to expand the usage of the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), while enabling supervised spending. PhonePe’s rival Google Pay announced support for UPI Circle in August 2024, but the feature has yet to roll out to users across the country.

PhonePe UPI Circle Features, Benefits

According to the Walmart-owned payments platform, the new UPI Circle feature is now rolling out to PhonePe users in the country. PhonePe users will be able to create a circle and generate UPI IDs for trusted contacts, such as family and friends, even if they do not have a bank account.

PhonePe users can now activate the UPI Circle feature
Photo Credit: PhonePe

Once a UPI Circle is created, a «primary» PhonePe user can create «secondary» users that must be added to their circle. These users will have their own UPI IDs that can be used to make purchases online or pay bills, and all transactions take place via the primary user’s bank account.

Usage of the UPI Circle feature on PhonePe can be controlled by the primary user in two ways. When the Partial Delegation mode is selected, the primary user will receive a prompt to authorise every transaction initiated by a secondary user. 

On the other hand, Full Delegation allows a primary user to set a maximum monthly spending limit for secondary users, and these transactions do not need to be manually approved. Primary users can set any limit up to Rs. 15,000, and there’s a limit of Rs. 5,000 per transaction.

Primary users can revoke access at any time, and keep an eye on all transactions made by secondary users. Meanwhile, each secondary user can have a different monthly spending limit.

UPI Circle allows primary users to add up to five secondary users, but a secondary user can only be linked to one primary user at a time. A primary user is notified after every transaction is completed, even if full delegation is set up for secondary users.

Google Pay announced support for UPI Circle in August 2024, but the platform has yet to roll out the feature to all users in the country. Users can also try out the UPI Circle feature via the Bharat Interface for Money (BHIM) app, which also supports the same functionality.