What happens if I enter the wrong UPI PIN during a transaction?*

I’d like to thump the table and say that the payment would fail.

But payments are not as rule-driven as people often assume.

End of the day, the purpose of a payment is not compliance but to facilitate a sale-purchase. As we know, in business, there’s always an element of risk, need for flexibility, and so on, so a pure-rule based payment system is not exactly ideal for business.

By default, Account-to-Account Method of Payments – the category of digital payments to which UPI belongs – support irrevocability, which means that once the merchant gets paid, he keeps the money, no matter whether the payor intended to make the payment to him or not.

I don’t know the internals of UPI but any business-friendly payment system should let the payee / merchant take a call on whether to accept a payment under the condition of revocability in case the payor enters wrong UPI PIN.

Lest anyone consider this far-fetched, credit card has such a provision.

 

*: This is the original question I answered. I’m repeating it to help me make sense of my answer in case it’s moved to / merged with some other question that I didn’t answer.