The Reserve Bank of India will soon make National Electronic Fund Transfer available round the clock on all days for bank customers. Currently, the channel can only be used between 8am to 7pm on working days.
“The Reserve Bank will make available the NEFT system on a 24x7 basis from December this year. This is expected to revolutionise the retail payments system of the country,” governor Shaktikanta Das said during the Monetary Policy press conference.
The announcement comes in line with RBI’s Payments Settlement Vision 2019 to 2021 where it was first proposed to make all NEFT and RTGS transfers round the clock for customers and free for all.
NEFT is central bank-controlled interoperable payment channels used for fund transfer by a customer between different accounts. These transactions are done on time batches unlike RTGS which makes this mode of payments non- instantaneous. However, while NEFT doesn’t have any minimum transaction limit, RTGS can only be used for high-value transactions with a minimum limit of Rs.2 lakh.
The central bank in the last policy had announced transactions routed through NEFT platforms would no longer attract RBI fees, which prompted all major banks to pass on these benefits to customers across India, one of the rare large economies where cheques are still the preferred payment method for many bank account holders. The policy decision has been aimed at achieving New Delhi’s broader ambition of enhancing adoption of digital channels for payments and reducing the reliance on cash.
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