NPCI In Early Talks With Bankers To Eliminate Pull Transactions Via UPI

In order to curb the rise in digital frauds, the National Payments Corporation of India is said to have been in early discussions with bankers to eliminate pull transactions through Unified Payments Interface, three people told NDTV Profit.

Most of the frauds are happening via the pull method. They are exploring to see if they can eliminate the pull method from the system itself and this way the fraud instances could come down, a person aware of the development said.

A pull transaction is when a merchant sends a payment request to a customer and a push transaction is when a customer makes the payment to a merchant by way of a quick-response code or other processes.

NPCI, that operates retail payments and settlement systems in India, declined to comment on the matter.

With this move, bankers say that genuine transactions may get impacted and efficiency might reduce, but the propensity to fraud might decrease significantly.

While these discussions are still in early stages, implementation of this move may not be final yet, people said.

With the rise in digital transactions, incidents of cyber frauds using novel modus operandi have increased in recent times.

Considering the fact that the financial losses and emotional distress caused by these frauds are substantial, it is imperative that regulated entities undertake wide-scale preventive awareness initiatives to caution the public about such frauds, the Reserve Bank of India had said in a recent report.

The number of complaints received by the offices of the Reserve Bank of India Ombudsman were 14,401 during April-June and 12,744 in July-September of the current financial year.

These complaints for the previous two quarters indicates that those pertaining to loans and advances and payment modes continue to constitute over 70% of the total number of complaints during the first two quarters of 2024-25 (April-March), the financial stability report for December 2024 showed.