Fintech Startups QubeHealth & Falcon join NPCI for RuPay-powered healthcare card

To enhance the growing system of easy-to-use healthcare credits in India, QubeHealth and Falcon, two fintech startups, have joined forces with the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) to provide a pre-paid health card powered by RuPay to their end users.

Health card Can Be Used In Both Virtual & Physical Forms

The card, which can be used in both virtual and physical forms, is seamlessly integrated within the QubeHealth mobile app and offers a fully digital onboarding process, UPI P2M payments, and cashback rewards

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) permitted users to connect their RuPay credit cards with the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), the National Payments Corporation of India, and payment aggregators last year.

How Will QubeHealth Card Help Employees?

QubeHealth offers top-quality healthcare payment products to employed individuals in India by bringing together healthcare providers, lenders, payment service providers, and Indian corporations. The aim is to provide a seamless healthcare borrowing and payment experience to salaried employees of some of India's most prominent corporations.

QubeHealth Cards enable employees to get reimbursements on healthcare expenditure from their employers as well as load this card with their own fund to avail cashbacks of up to 50 per cent and discounts at QubeHealth partner merchant ecosystem, which comprises over 600 brands of health service providers and over 11,000 hospitals and clinics across the country.

As part of their strategic collaboration, Falcon will offer its complete BaaS (Backend-as-a-Service) platform to QubeHealth, enabling them to integrate a healthcare wallet and RuPay co-branded prepaid card for their end users.

NPCI Enables Payment Aggregators To Allow UPI Payments

In a statement, NPCI has said it enabled key aggregators like BharatPe, Cashfree Payments, Google Pay, Razorpay, Paytm, PayU, and Pine Labsto help merchant transactions through RuPay credit cards on UPI in the Indian market. 

"In today's business landscape, nearly every enterprise is becoming fintech-enabled. NPCI also plays a crucial role in the growth of India's embedded finance ecosystem. Healthcare is a vital sector in the country, particularly in terms of inclusion and digitalization,” Nalin Bansal, Chief of Corporate and Fintech Relationships and Key Initiatives at NPCI said.

UPI customers were earlier allowed to make transactions only through their bank accounts, overdraft accounts, and prepaid accounts. Now, by linking RuPay credit cards to UPI, customers can directly transact by scanning a merchant's QR code without the need to use credit cards. 

RuPay credit cards issued by Bank of Baroda, HDFC Bank, Punjab National Bank, Union Bank of India, Indian Bank, and Canara Bank can link their cards to UPI applications like BHIM, Paytm, and others. 

“After the RBI’s decision to start linking RuPay credit cards to UPI, we immediately started enabling leading payment aggregators to boost merchant acceptance and customer awareness to attract early and widespread adoption," Bansal said.

"Going ahead, we aim to explore more relevant avenues to promote the adoption of digital payments via credit cards on UPI for smoother, more reliable, and secure credit-based transactions to underwrite every eligible Indian,” he added

How Will Linking Credit Cards to UPI to Boost Acceptability?

On a daily basis, UPI is utilized by around 250 million Indians, whereas approximately 50 million individuals possess one or more credit cards. Linking credit cards to UPI will increase its acceptability, as UPI's extensive network of QR codes provides customers with more acceptance points. Moreover, this union benefits merchants in semi-urban regions where card point-of-sale terminals are not widely accessible.