Fast digital payments are one of the backbones of India’s financial ecosystem. As per RBI data, digital payments have increased by 38-fold, while transaction value has more than tripled in the past decade. This rapid increase in instantaneous digital payments has also led to an increase in digital scams or the Authorised Push Payment scams. To address this issue and prevent scammers from defrauding unsuspecting users of their hard-earned money, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has proposed introducing a one-hour delay for instantaneous digital transfers.
For the unversed, Authorised Push Payment (APP) scams are the scams in which fraudsters trick individuals into transferring money directly and voluntarily to them by posing as trusted entities such as banking officials or suppliers. Since the individuals authorise these payments in real-time, these transactions are hard to recover and often cause significant financial losses.
How does the RBI want to curb digital payments scams?
The central bank has released a discussion paper called ‘Exploring safeguards in digital payments to curb frauds’. This discussion paper proposes putting a short delay of one hour on peer-to-peer payments on transfers above ₹10,000. This short delay window is expected to curb APP scams by giving users an opportunity to reconsider their transaction. This measure is not only being considered for UPI payments but also for other digital payments modes including Immediate Payment Service (IMPS), National Electronic Funds Transfer (NEFT), Real Time Gross Settlement (RTGS), mobile wallets, and net banking.
As a part of this process, the payer’s bank would temporarily debit the customer’s account while the payer would retain the option to cancel the transaction. “During this period, if the payer’s bank identifies the transaction as unusual or atypical, it may seek reconfirmation from the payer, while sharing appropriate information on the nature of the suspicion and cautioning the payer. If the payer, after reviewing the information provided, still chooses to proceed, the transaction will be executed by payer bank,” RBI wrote in its press release.
The RBI also plans to provide an override mechanism to bypass this lag. This is likely to be implemented using a whitelisting mechanism for specific payees. This means that the payees who have been whitelisted will not be subjected to any time lag.
RBI’s plan for protecting senior citizens from digital payments scams
Apart from this, the RBI is also proposing new measures to safeguard senior citizens and differently-abled people from APP scams. For this, the central bank is proposing that these individuals appoint a ‘trusted person’ who will act as another layer of authentication for transactions above ₹50,000.
While users will be allowed to change their trusted person, this process will come with a cooling period of 24 hours to ensure that these decisions are well informed and prevent further scams.
That said, RBI is exempting merchant transactions (including UPI, card-based, and net banking payments), recurring payments and cheque-based transactions from the purview of these requirements.
Lastly, the RBI proposed to provide customers with special digital payment controls, including an on/off switch’ for setting limits for different transaction types at the account level and for any digital payment. This would sit on top of the card-based controls already available to the users. The idea is to allow customers to control “debit transactions at the account level across any or all digital payment channels”.
RBI also plans to provide customers a one-stroke kill switch to disable all digital payment transactions from the account. This control will override all existing controls and configurations set by the account holder and disabling it would be permitted after proper authentication or a physical visit to the nearest bank branch.
When will these measures be implemented?
As of now, there is no date when these safety measures will be implemented.
