The Reserve Bank of India’s governor Shaktikanta Das has proposed the use of UPI (united payments interface) to facilitate cardless cash withdrawals across all banks and ATM networks.
Which means soon, you won’t need a physical card to withdraw cash at an Indian ATM – just a UPI app.
The idea behind this is to help prevent frauds such as card cloning, skimming, device tampering, etc, Das said on Friday, speaking at the central bank’s monetary policy meeting.
Currently, only a handful of banks such as SBI, ICICI, Axis, and Bank of Baroda offer cardless cash withdrawal facilities, but the governor hopes more banks and ATMs could be equipped to handle such transactions. Employing UPI, which is largely mobile app-based, would be one way to go.
However, given the number of outages that frequently happen on UPI, and especially third-party apps such as GooglePay that enable UPI transactions, it remains to be seen how the body behind the UPI, NPCI — the National Payments Commission of India — would make the facility smoother and easier to use.
