RBI Increases E-Mandate Limit For Recurring Payments To INR 15,000

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has increased the limit of e-mandates on cards for recurring payments from INR 5000 to INR 15,000. The central bank will issue necessary instructions shortly, it said in a statement.

Last October, RBI’s regulations on e-mandates or recurring payments via cards became effective. Under these norms, a card issuer needs to send a pre-transaction notification to the cardholder at least 24 hours before any automated debit. Moreover, any monthly subscriptions exceeding INR 5000 have to be cleared through an additional factor of authentication (AFA).

The RBI received requests from stakeholders to increase the limit under the framework to facilitate payments of larger value like subscriptions, insurance premiums, education fee, among others.

=“To further augment customer convenience and leverage the benefits available under the framework, it is proposed to enhance the limit from INR 5,000 to INR 15,000 per recurring payment,” RBI said in a statement.

Hence, for transactions up to INR 15,000, customers will no longer be required to provide a one-time password (OTP). 

The framework for processing of e-mandate based recurring payments was introduced by the RBI, keeping in mind the benefits of convenience, safety and security to the users, RBI governor Shaktikanta Das said.

Under this framework, over 6.25 Cr mandates have been registered, including over 3,400 international merchants, RBI informed. 

Further, RBI is also planning to link credit cards to UPI. For the beginning, RuPay credit cards will be enabled with this facility. 

“This arrangement is expected to provide more avenues and convenience to the customers in making payments through UPI platform. This facility would be available after the required system development is complete,” RBI said in a statement. 

According to RBI, over 26 Cr unique users and 5 Cr merchants have been onboarded on the UPI platform as of now. In May 2022 alone, 594.63 Cr transactions amounting to INR 10.40 Lakh Cr were processed through UPI.