Buffer is an offline payment service, built on the top of BHIM(PhonePay), which can be used on any mobile device (including legacy mobile devices which don't even have a GUI or provisions for internet connectivity) without installing any additional application.
We intended to target the demographics who don't own a smartphone or have proper internet access, staying true to "Building for India", the hackathon's theme.
Our efforts also highlighted a way for NPCI to increase their user-base.
This was possible due to SMS capabilities in every mobile device, hence we hacked on that to make and receive payments easily using a simple keyword buffer.
We built this using :
We also used the following to imitate an SMS gateway :
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Twilio, cloud platform providing SMS APIs for text-messaging.
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A mobile application to route text-messages to a web-server.
Requirements:
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Ruby
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Redis
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bundler gem
Installation:
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Run
rake install. It will installbundlerif you have not it installed and install needed gems. -
Rename
config.json.sampletoconfig.jsonand replaceXXXXwith needed values.
Running:
- Run the service with
rake runor justrakein your console.
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Since registering a new user (unique : mobile number) is a 2-step process on BHIM/UPI, we implemented a similar logic.
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User can simply initiate the registration process by sending the following text to a UPI dedicated number
buffer (reg | registration) <email>
- Doing this results in the user receiving a SMS with an OTP. He/She needs to send this to the dedicated number in the following format.
buffer validate <OTP>
Hooray! You successfully registered at PayTM (if you hadn't) and our service as well.
buffer (bal | balance)
buffer (send | pay) <payee number> <amount>
According to a survey conducted by The Hindu in 2011, around 83.3 crore people still live in Rural India. In another survey by LiveMint, only 45% people in India owned a smartphone in 2013.
It seems we have created a possible user-base of around 83.3 crore people for NPCI.