UPI Lite wallets may be recharged automatically

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The Reserve Bank on Friday proposed a system to allow customers to automatically recharge their UPI Lite wallets, in a bid to promote small-value digital payments. At present, the UPI Lite has a daily limit of Rs 2,000, with Rs 500 as upper limit for a single payment.

UPI Lite is a simplified version of the Unified Payments Interface (UPI). Any payment under Rs 500 does not require the user to key in a PIN for authorising payment. Presently, the UPI Lite app can only hold a maximum of Rs 2000 at a time.

“To encourage wider adoption of UPI Lite, it is now proposed to bring it under the e-mandate framework by introducing a facility for customers to automatically replenish their UPI Lite wallets if the balance goes below the threshold limit set by them,” RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das said. This will further enhance the ease of making small value digital payments, he said while announcing the bi-monthly monetary policy here.

UPI Lite was introduced in September 2022 to enable small value payments in a quick and seamless manner through an on-device wallet. Das further said that the adoption of e-mandates for recurring payment transactions has been increasing.

It is now proposed to include payments, such as replenishment of balances in Fastag, National Common Mobility Card (NCMC), etc., which are recurring in nature, but without any fixed periodicity, in the e-mandate framework, he noted.