Indian lenders have asked the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to allow customers with UPI 2.0-enabled devices to use the recurring payments feature for such things as the monthly instalments on their loans, insurance premiums, and mutual fund investments, the Economic Times reported. UPI is a mobile platform that facilitates instant fund transfer between two bank accounts without requiring details of the beneficiary’s bank account. It also allows users to link multiple bank accounts to a single mobile banking app. It's worth noting that when the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) launched the upgraded version of the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), dubbed UPI 2.0, in August 2018, the absence of recurring payments had disappointed companies. The RBI said then that the feature was omitted because it was open to misuse. According to the ET report, after UPI 2.0 was launched, the Indian Banks’ Association, with representatives from major public sector and private sector banks, sent a detailed proposal to the regulator seeking permission for regulated financial entities to use recurring payments for loans, premiums and so on. Why recurring billing is important While banks and their customers await the introduction of recurring payments in UPI 2.0, the facility has been available through credit and debit cards for some time. We had reported in October 2016 that a number of websites and services had started offering recurring payments on cards. These included Business Standard, STAR TV’s HotStar and Ola Money auto-recharge. A month later, payments gateways Paynimo and Razorpay started offering recurring payments on…
