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title = "PaisaVasool - HackInOut 2019" |
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date = 2019-10-25T15:30:03+05:30 |
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draft = false |
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categories = ["projects"] |
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type = "post" |
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url = "blog/2019/10/25/paisavasool-hackinout-2019" |
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author = "Rohan Verma" |
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Last weekend I attended a hackathon after a long time. HackInOut, which is |
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India's biggest community hackathon, was happening very close to where I live. I |
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went with my office colleagues [Vivek](https://vivekr.dev) and [Karan](https://mrkaran.dev) and we had discussed a lot of ideas before reaching the venue, |
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but we were not sure what we will finally end up building. |
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After discussing our ideas with Siddharth Shetty, an iSpirit fellow |
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and one of the mentors at the hackathon, we finally decided to build |
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PaisaVasool. |
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## What is PaisaVasool |
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Split subscriptions and collect money automatically and instantly over UPI seamlessly. |
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<iframe width="100%" height="480" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/QyaZFz8StoQ" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe> |
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## The problem it solves |
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Sharing subscriptions like Netflix friends is not seamless. Collect payments |
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online and reconciling them manually using Apps still requires us |
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to manually confirm payments, and APIs/SDKs by PSPs are expensive. |
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## The hack |
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We piggyback on paisa values in the UPI request amount as the transaction ID, |
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and reconcile the payment seamlessly and automatically into the subscriptions. |
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## The app |
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To demonstrate the hack for this hackathon, we decided to concentrate our efforts |
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to Splitting Recurring Payments such as those for |
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Netflix/Amazon Prime/Hotstar/Spotify etc. Although, our |
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hack can be extended to any kind of collect requests. |
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A user can create groups on our app and enter his friends contact details |
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and instantly get reconciliations from our app when he receives payments. |
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### Our hack allows you to consolidate your UPI requests for free! |
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- Daily UPI requests are limited by PSP apps like Google Pay. |
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- You can request upto 5 times on Google Pay a day |
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- New users can't be requested more than once a day |
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- Payment API's are expensive |
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- Costs (2% per transaction) are added onto the consumers |
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- You need to check your Bank transaction details and reconcile manually without a PSP |
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- Apps like Paisa Vasool are impossible on top of UPI as of today |
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### Our hack allows payers to pay with any VPA. |
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- No need to ask your user to be on a specific UPI app |
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- No need for payee to pay from his own account (parents/friends can pay on behalf) |
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### Instant reconcilation |
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- We process the transacation as soon as we get the bank SMS |
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- Users don't need to check their bank details |
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## Challenges we ran into |
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The biggest challenge was to figure out a way to solve these issues: |
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- How to identify a transaction |
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- How to not need the payers VPA |
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We figured out that: |
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- The identifier can be embedded in the paisa value |
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- We can read SMS to get the amount and parse the transaction ID. |
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### Detailed technical flow |
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- User installs our app and gives read permission for SMS to our app. |
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- Our app is open source and only sends SMS with UPI VPAs to our server |
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- They create a collect request in the UI with the amount and users, and create a group for recurring weekly/monthly transactions. |
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- User adds his clients/friends to the group using mobile number and/or email |
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- These are saved for the future |
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- The collect request is then processed by the server |
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- UPI link (which can be embedded in SMS/Whatsapp/Telegram) is created using [https://upi.link/](https://upi.link/) API - It is sent to all the clients/friends with appropriate amount that has been hacked to include the transaction identifier in the amount paisa value. |
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- The app waits for SMS from the bank of the User, which includes the amount (plus paisa value identifier) inside it. |
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- On receiving the SMS, we change the state of the pending transaction to complete. |
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- The user can check the state and see all his transactions from our app. |
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## Future |
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- The [Sahamati framework](http://www.sahamati.org/) in the future will allow users to share their bank transaction ledger details with apps directly in a standardized format via Aggregators. |
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- UPI roadmap has split requests planned for the future. |
