BENGALURU: The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) on Thursday expanded the scope of the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) by permitting the operation of pre-sanctioned credit lines at banks through the UPI.
In FY23, according to the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), UPI payments rose nearly 82 per cent.
"This initiative will further encourage innovation," said RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das while announcing the decisions of the bi-monthly MPC meeting.
"The UPI has transformed retail payments in India. UPI’s robustness has been leveraged to develop new products and features from time to time," he said.
Recently, RuPay credit cards were permitted to be linked to UPI. This was in addition to the existing facility of linkage of UPI with deposit accounts. After this move, NPCI and payment aggregators joined forces to support credit transactions on UPI.
Earlier, UPI customers were able to make transactions only through their bank accounts, overdraft accounts, and prepaid accounts. Now, with the linking of RuPay credit cards to UPI, customers will no longer have to carry their credit cards with them at all times for payments.
Over the last few years, UPI has become one of the most inclusive modes of payment in India with over 250 million users and five crore merchants on the platform.
In March, UPI recorded 870 crore transactions.
The RBI governor on Thursday also announced that in order to improve and widen the access of depositors to information on unclaimed deposits, it has been decided to develop a web portal to enable search across multiple banks for possible unclaimed deposits.
This will help depositors or beneficiaries in getting back their unclaimed deposits.