MUMBAI: The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has instructed banks not to charge savings account holders for National Electronic Funds Transfer (NEFT) with effect from January 1, 2020.
RBI said digital payments constituted a high 96 per cent of total non-cash retail payments during the period October 2018 to September 2019.
During the same period, 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 regulator said.
The RBI said in June that it had done away with NEFT and RTGS transactions. The June statement said that in order to provide an impetus to digital funds movement, it has been decided to do away with the charges levied by the Reserve Bank for transactions processed in the RTGS and NEFT systems.
RBI also required the banks, in turn, to pass these benefits to their customers. “Instructions to banks in this regard will be issued within a week,” the central bank had said in June.
RTGS is meant for large-value instantaneous fund transfers while the NEFT is used for fund transfers up to Rs2 lakh.
