No NEFT charges from January
The country’s largest lender, State Bank of India, on Friday announced a 5 basis points cut in its Marginal Cost of Funds based lending rates (MCLR) across all tenors while steeply reducing fixed deposit rates. The one-year MCLR to which most of its loans are linked will come down to 8 per cent per annum from 8.05 per cent. This is the bank’s seventh consecutive cut in MCLR in the current financial year.
The bank also cut the retail term deposit rates by 15 basis points for ‘one year to less than two years’ tenor. For bulk term deposits—of Rs 2 crore and above— the bank slashed interest rates by 30-75 basis points across tenors.
“In view of adequate liquidity in the system, SBI revises its interest rates on Term Deposits,” the bank said. Both the new MCLR rate and deposit rates will be effective from November 10.
Your NEFT payments will not attract charges from next year. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has mandated banks not to charge savings account holders for NEFT with effect from January 2020.
The RBI this year had done away with charges on NEFT and RTGS transactions and asked banks to pass on the benefit to their customers.
Among other provisions, the apex bank has also proposed that FASTags would be enabled to pay for parking fee and even at fuel stations.
Digital payments constituted a high 96 per cent of the total non-cash retail payments during the period October 2018 to September 2019 said the RBI. The retail digital transactions volume has increased by 60 per cent CAGR to about 2,846 crore during this period while in value terms the retail digital transactions reached Rs 302 lakh crore during the same period. During this period, the National Electronic Funds Transfer (NEFT) and Unified Payments Interface (UPI) systems handled 252 crore and 874 crore transactions with year-on-year growth of 20 per cent and 263 per cent respectively. “This rapid growth in the payment systems, inter-alia, has been facilitated by a series of measures taken by the Reserve Bank of India,” the RBI said.
The central bank will also be constituting a committee “to assess the need for plurality of QR codes and merits of their coexistence or convergence from both systemic and consumer viewpoints”.