UPI Lite wallet limit and transaction limits for feature phone users increased

• The Reserve Bank of India has increased the UPI Lite wallet limit to ₹5,000.
• The per-transaction limit has also been increased to ₹1,000 from the current ₹500.
• The central bank has announced a beneficiary account name look-up facility for RTGS and NEFT.

The Reserve Bank on Wednesday announced the increase of the UPI Lite wallet limit to ₹5,000 and per-transaction limit to ₹1,000, to encourage wider adoption of digital payments

A limit of ₹500 per transaction and an overall limit of ₹2,000 per UPI Lite wallet is applicable currently. With this, the per transaction limit has been doubled and the overall limit has been increased 2.5 times.

At the bi-monthly monetary policy meeting, the central bank Governor Shaktikanta Das also said the per-transaction limit in UPI123Pay will be increased to ₹10,000 from the existing ₹5,000.

For those unaware, UPI123 was launched in March 2022, to enable feature-phone users to use UPI. This facility is now available in 12 languages.

The governor also announced a beneficiary account name look-up facility for Real Time Gross Settlement System (RTGS) and National Electronic Funds Transfer (NEFT) systems.

Payment Systems like UPI and IMPS provide a facility for the remitter to verify the name of the receiver (beneficiary) before initiating a payment transaction.

There have been requests to introduce such a facility for RTGS and NEFT systems, the Governor said.

"Accordingly, to enable remitters in RTGS and NEFT to verify the name of the beneficiary account holder before initiating funds transfer, it is now proposed to introduce a 'beneficiary account name look-up facility'," he said.

As part of this, remitters can input the account number and the branch IFSC code of the beneficiary, following which the name of the beneficiary will be displayed. This facility is aimed at increasing customer confidence and reducing the possibility of wrong credits and fraud.

The Central Bank will also create a 'Reserve Bank Climate Risk Information System (RB-CRIS)' amid climate change emerging as one of the significant risks to the financial system.

Das said it is crucial for regulated entities to undertake climate risk assessments to ensure the stability of their balance sheets and that of the financial system.

Such an assessment requires, among other things, high-quality data relating to local climate scenarios, climate forecasts, and emissions, he said.

The available climate-related data is characterised by various gaps such as fragmented and varied sources, differing formats, frequencies and units.

To bridge these gaps, Das said the Reserve Bank proposes to create a data repository – RB-CRIS, comprising two parts.

The first part will be a web-based directory, listing various data sources, (meteorological, geospatial, etc.) which will be publicly accessible on the RBI website. The second part will be a data portal consisting of datasets (processed data in standardised formats).

With inputs from agencies.

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