RBI announces moves to boost digital payments
MUMBAI: The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) on Friday announced a number of moves in the payments space to boost digitization and data availability, mostly updates to earlier announcements, besides a few fresh initiatives.
While the central bank, in its monetary policy of August 2019, said money transfers via National Electronic Funds Transfer (NEFT) will be provided 24X7 from December, so far, NEFT fund transfers are possible from 8am to 7pm on all working days, except the second and fourth Saturdays of a month.
On Friday, the RBI added that it will extend collateralized liquidity support on NEFT round the clock. Collateralized liquidity support broadly refers to the RBI putting in the shortfall of funds in a transaction, in exchange for the payer’s securities as collateral.
The RBI also mandated large non-bank prepaid payment instrument (PPI) issuers such as Amazon Pay, Mobikwik or PhonePe to set up an internal ombudsman for digital transactions to facilitate a swift and costeffective complaint redressal mechanism.
It will be applicable to issuers with over 10 million prepaid payment instruments outstanding. The scheme was set up in January 2019.
Given the rapid developments in the digital payments space, the RBI plans to publish more granular data covering payment systems authorized by the central bank. However, what kind of additional data can be expected was not clarified.
While cards are being issued at a rapid pace, the RBI wants to ensure the payment acceptance infrastructure keeps up pace with the creation of an ‘Acceptance Development Fund’, which will be operationalized by December.
To further expand the digital payments ecosystem, the RBI asked state/UT level bankers’ committees to identify one district in their respective states/ UTs to make it 100% digitally enabled.