• Jay drives to the petrol bunk and requests petrol refill of Rs. 1000 to his car.
• The attender refills and asks the mode of payment.
• Jay says UPI, scans a QR pasted near the pump pillar and sends money.
• The attender interrupts and annoyingly asks why he sent the money through that QR. The attender then said Jay needs to scan the QR from a card board he was holding onto his hand, which had a QR printed in A5 sheet and pasted.

Looks like the petrol bunk has different modes of UPI payment. This is apart from cash and card payments.

• Some QR payments are processed through the petroleum companies payment gateway
• Some QR payments are processed through the petrol bunks bank account
• Some QR payments go directly to the petrol bunk owners bank account

The QRs were, either pasted on the dispenser or printed and held on hand or printed to plastic holders supplied by payment aggregators or generated through the POS machine. There is some confusion and delay in processing the payment. The next vehicle waiting is honking.

How might we enable faster & easier UPI payments at petrol bunks?

I could think of a user feedback from the office tea stall:

“Do you feel, opening the app at tea stall, adding the amount and then entering the PIN, a painful process? The user says, he is used to it daily and it feels like a ritual. While he asks the tea vendor, 1 ginger tea, the user is parallelly scanning the QR code and much before he gets the tea, he finishes the payment and waits for the tea.”

Similarly, if the petrol bunks can display QR codes for UPI payments, prominently, (Ex. Red circled space in the dispenser image below) the drivers can intimate the quantity or the amount of fuel (Ex. 10 litres or for Rs. 1000) to be refilled and while it is getting refilled, they can scan the QR code and make payment. Each pump or dispenser can have unique QR code so that it is easy for each servicing attender to generate his end of day accounts and make settlements.

Also, to improve trust and efficiency, apart from the innovative soundbox the UPI app has provided, we can think of a low energy consuming display like Kindle readers, that can be placed near the petrol dispenser and display the amount received from the customer or the vehicle no.

The UPI app can allow users to create a label of his vehicle type and vehicle number.
Ex. Maruti Swift: IQ 01 AM 3499
The label can be tagged and displayed alongside each refuel payment acknowledgement for easier visibility and acknowledgement, thereby improving trust and increasing the speed of payment.

If the user has leased the car through his office, she/he might like to have receipts for all the spends on fuel and receipts for driver’s salary. How might we enable the petrol bunks to share digitally generated receipts back to the user after refueling?

*”Petrol Bunk” is the most widely used term in India, for a fuel station. Different terminologies used across the world are: Gas Station, Petrol Station, Fuel Station, Filling Station, Petrol Pump…etc.