UPI apps may soon impose a transaction limit

The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) may soon implement its proposed December 31 deadline to limit the volume cap for third-party UPI app providers (TPAP), reported ANI. This means that people in India will lose the ability to make unlimited transactions via PhonePe, Google Pay and other UPI applications.

UPI platforms such as PhonePe and Google Pay are currently dominating the market with approx 80 percent share. In order to avoid the monopoly of any UPI app, NPCI has sent a proposal of a 30 percent volume cap in November 2022, which the organisation wants the RBI to approve. At the moment, there is no transaction cap on any UPI based application like Paytm, PhonePe and Google Pay.

Reportedly, a meeting was held to comprehensively understand the current status quo following the proposal. The reports suggest that senior officials from NPCI, finance ministry and RBI were present at this meeting. However, no decision has been taken, yet.

According to some reports, it is believed that industry stakeholders requested the NCPI to extend the deadline and it is being examined as of for now. Moreover, it is likely that the issue of UPI market limit implementation will get resolved by the end of December.

Meanwhile, the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) said recently that it has waived till year-end the switching fee for all RuPay issuing and acquiring member banks for point of sales (PoS) and e-commerce transactions.

The switching fee is waived effective 11 November till 31 December 2016, NPCI said in a statement here on Monday. The charges were at Rs0.60 to card issuing bank (issuer) and Rs0.30 to card accepting bank (acquirer) for PoS and e-commerce transactions.

“The objective is to support banks in the activation of existing RuPay cards, issuance of new cards to un-carded customers and to widen the acceptance points,” NPCI managing director and CEO A P Hota said.

The country has about 14 lakh PoS terminals and the acceptance points are growing. With right push, 755 million debit cards customers can generate about 50 million card transactions a day from the current level of hardly 5 million transactions, NPCI said.