No NEFT Charges For Savings Bank Account From Next Year, Says RBI
Efforts to promote digital payments have resulted in a rapid growth in retail digital payments systems, RBI noted.
Savings bank account holders wouldn’t be charged for National Electronic Funds Transfer from next year, the Reserve Bank of India said today.
That was among the measures announced by the central bank in a statement to boost digital payments in India. The other measures include:
- Operationalise the Acceptance Development Fund to increase acceptance infrastructure with effect from January 1, 2020. The fund was earlier proposed by the central bank to increase digitisation across India. The fund’s framework is expected to be operationalised by December.
- Constitute a committee to assess the need for plurality of QR codes and merits of their co-existence or convergence.
- Permit authorised payment systems and instruments to be linked with National Electronic Toll Collection FASTags.
- Enable processing of e-mandates for transactions through United Payments Interface.
The RBI noted that its efforts to promote digital payments have resulted in a rapid growth in retail digital payments systems.
Retail digital transactions grew at an annualised rate of 61 percent to Rs 2,846 crore between October 2015 and September 2019, the central bank said. In terms of value, retail digital transactions grew by 39 percent to Rs 302 crore in the same period, it said.
Digital payments comprised 96 percent of total non-cash retail payments between October 2018 and September 2019, when the NEFT and UPI systems grew by 20 percent and 263 percent on an annual basis respectively, the central bank said.