New RBI rule on recurring payment not to impact transactions with compliant merchants

Banking sector experts said that most of these merchants offering various bouquet of service have migrated to the new Standard Instruction Platform put in place by the banks in the country. This would mean that payment instruction to these compliant vendors would have to be revalidated once and it would move seamlessly in subsequent months without any hindrance to the service. 

As part of measures to secure recurring transactions made by customers using their cards, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has mandated new auto-debit rules that have kicked in from October 1. The apex banks directive states that there will be no automatic recurring payment for various services including utility bills, recharge of phone, DTH, and OTT, among others as the additional factor of authentication (AFA) will become mandatory. 

This created confusion initially as customers were flooded with messages to update their payment instruction or else such transactions would be declined from the beginning of October. 

"We have not experienced any disruption in service or customer complaints over new system of recurring payments. Most banks are already compliant with new security measure and several large merchants have also updated their transaction systems and have joined the standard instruction platform of banks. Some merchants are still non compliant to the changes and customers would have to authorize payments under an additional factor of authentication (AFA)," said a senior executive from country's largest private sector bank asking not to be named as he was not authorized to speak to media. 

The new RBI rules will not impact any standing instructions registered using bank accounts for mutual funds, SIPs, equated monthly instalments. It will also not impact payment to complaint merchants. 

Customers will have to go through a one-time registration process, and subsequent transactions can be performed without the additional factor authentication. 

While registering, customers can now provide the validity period for future transactions. For recurring payments above Rs 5,000, banks are required to send a one-time password to customers as per the new guidelines.