Customers of seven banks can now issue standing instructions for recurring payments online, through the National Payment Corporation of India’s (NPCI) National Automated Clearing House (NACH), the Times of India reports. Standing instructions are a way of making an automatic payment of a fixed amount to a loan, bill or credit card at the same time every week or month. The process has traditionally involved paper forms and cheques under the RBI’s electronic clearing services (ECS) and the newer NACH. Making the process paperless will speed it up, reduce handling costs and prevent problems such as signature mismatches. The seven banks are Yes Bank, Kotak Mahindra Bank, IDFC Bank, Axis Bank, Central Bank, Bank of Baroda and Punjab National Bank. All seven allow customers to provide standing instructions through netbanking, and Kotak Mahindra allows this through debit cards as well. Problems with eSigned mandates Banks did provide a paperless eSign facility for mandates briefly, staring in May 2017, but the NPCI discontinued this shortly after the Supreme Court restricted the use of Aadhaar last September. However, eSigned mandates had other issues as well. In March 2018, Moneycontrol reported an incident in which a Delhi-based coaching centre, while ostensibly performing eKYC, in reality acquired an eSigned mandate for a loan from a digital lender to the individual, disbursed directly to the coaching centre. The fraud could be pulled off because of the lack of a perceptible difference between verification of identity (Aadhaar authentication), approval to share KYC data (Aadhaar eKYC), authorisation (Aadhaar eSign), and financial…
