Back‘Fees only for merchant UPI payments with different PPIs’
Interoperable charge of 1.1% for each transaction above ₹2,000 will be payable
PremiumNEW DELHI : National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) on Wednesday clarified that bank to bank account transfer via UPI will continue to remain free but any merchant payment that goes through two different wallets will be chargeable above ₹2,000.
The interoperable charge of 1.1% for each transaction above ₹2,000 will be payable by merchant from 1 April.
“Interchange charges are only applicable for the prepaid payment instruments (PPI) merchant transactions and there is no charge to customers," NPCI, payment gateway, clarified in a statement.
In simple words, the charge will kick in when a customer having a wallet of one particular company makes a payment to a merchant, who has a wallet of another company. This levy was being introduced to help cover for the cost of interchange or interoperable between two wallets.
PhonePe, GooglePay Paytm are dominant players in the mobile-wallet payment market.
NPCI has permitted the PPI wallets to be part of interoperable UPI ecosystem and levied 1.1% charge on unified payment interface (UPI) transactions above ₹2,000 while using PPI.
“The interchange charges introduced are only applicable for the PPI merchant transactions and there is no charge to customers, and it is further clarified that there are no charges for the bank account to bank account-based UPI payments (i.e. normal UPI payments)," it said.
With this addition to UPI, the customers will have the choice of using any bank account, RuPay Credit card and prepaid wallets on UPI-enabled apps, it said. Share of individual to merchants transactions above ₹2,000 is about 5% of the total transactions in February.
In recent times, it said, UPI has emerged as the preferred mode of digital payment by offering free, fast, secure and seamless experience.
Traditionally, it said, the most preferred method of UPI transactions is linking the bank account in any UPI-enabled app for making payments, which contribute over 99.9% of total UPI transactions. These bank account-to-account transactions continue to remain free for customers and merchants.
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