Airtel has launched a new feature called Safe Pay for digital payments for all Airtel Payments Bank account holders. The attempt to add another layer of authentication to protect transactions against cyber and banking frauds. The way Airtel Safe Pay works is that for every transaction where money from your Airtel Payments Bank account is to be debited, you’ll get an alert, and you have to give your approval in response to that message for the transaction to go ahead and be completed. At this time, an Airtel Payments Bank account can hold a maximum balance of Rs 1 lakh. Airtel also says that any UPI app can be linked to your Airtel Payments Bank account, thereby protecting your primary bank account details from exposure during transactions.
Airtel has also finally rolled out video KYC for users who wish to either open a new Airtel Payments Bank account or upgrade from the Airtel Wallet digital payment services. This is one convenience feature that had been a glaring omission from the Airtel digital payments ecosystem till now, but something that rivals such as Paytm had deployed a long time ago. For this, you will need to have your Aadhaar number or Aadhaar VID and your PAN number ready for the video KYC authentication. Airtel says that Aadhaar and PAN verification is compulsory with UIDAI and NSDL respectively as per the Video KYC guidelines. The Airtel Safe Pay and Airtel Payments Bank Video KYC is available now for Airtel Thanks app users, on the Apple iPhone and Android phones. The new options should show up on your app in the coming days, if not already. At this time, Airtel Safe Pay is available only to anyone who has a full-fledged Payments Bank account, and not a Airtel Wallet digital payment service.
If you have an Airtel Payments Bank account, you may want to enable Safe Pay, and if you don’t have a Payments Bank account just yet, you may want to complete the Video KYC process done. I had detailed my sordid experience, in December, how Airtel without any prior warning or indication, blocked my Airtel Wallet which also had a FASTag linked to it, and then asked me to visit an Airtel store to complete the KYC process to mandatorily upgrade to an Airtel Payments Bank account. Continuing with just the Airtel Wallet service wasn’t an option. Putting this on the record again—that Airtel Wallet remains inactive, purely because I didn’t want to pander to unfair policies of having to mandatorily upgrade to a payments bank account and also have to step out and visit a physical store in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, where digital processing have become the norm and social distancing as well as limited human contract are requirements.
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