The Reserve Bank of India on Friday announced a proposal to increase the per-transaction limit for the Immediate Payment Service (IMPS) from ₹2 lakh to ₹5 lakh for channels other than SMS and IVRS.
“This will lead to further increase in digital payments and will provide an additional facility to customers for making digital payments beyond ₹2 lakh,” RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das said.
The per-transaction limit for SMS and IVRS (interactive voice response) channels is ₹5,000.
Experts said this will help corporates and MSMEs, and push use of digital payments.
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“It will help large corporates and MSMEs bring in greater flexibility and obvious cost efficiency by eliminating manual efforts and errors accompanying these processes. Add to it the real gains from this move that will be seen in increased working capital management, enhanced transactional speed across the supply chain, as well as improved cash flow,” said Narayan ‘Naru’ Ramamoorthy, Chief Revenue Officer, Global PayEX.
Geotagging of touchpoints
The RBI also unveiled a slew of other measures related to payment and settlement systems including geotagging of payment system touchpoints.
It has proposed to lay down a framework for geotagging (capturing geographical coordinates through latitude and longitude) of physical payment acceptance infrastructure, point of sale terminals and quick response (QR) codes used by merchants.
Improve acceptance infra
This would complement the Payment Infrastructure Development Fund framework through better deployment of acceptance infrastructure and wider access to digital payments.
“To ensure a balanced spread of acceptance infrastructure across the length and breadth of the country, it is essential to ascertain location information of existing payment acceptance infrastructure. In this regard, geotagging technology, by providing location information on an ongoing basis, can be useful in targeting areas with deficient infrastructure for focussed policy action,” the RBI said.
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It has also proposed that the topic for the Fourth Cohort would be ‘Prevention and Mitigation of Financial Frauds’.
“The focus would be on using technology to reduce the lag between the occurrence and detection of frauds, strengthening the fraud governance structure and minimising response time to frauds,” the RBI said, adding that the application window for this cohort would be opened in due course.
In addition, based on the experience gained and the feedback received from stakeholders, it has proposed to facilitate ‘On Tap’ application for themes of cohorts earlier closed.