Mandar Agashe, Founder, Vice-Chairman and MD, Sarvatra Technologies

“The RBI’s, decision is a huge leap forward in safeguarding customers' interests whilst enhancing the security of payments. With the new regulations, customers will now be required to re-register each of their payment instruments then may it be a debit card, credit card or UPI for a service under the recurring mandate. Post-re-registration, the first transaction will have to be executed via additional factor authentication (AFA) by approving the auto-debit request beforehand. While consecutive transactions, for value upto Rs. 5000 can be executed seamlessly without AFA, transactions of value above Rs. 5000, will require chipping in the OTP every time. While at the onset, this may impact customer convenience to some extent, it will elevate payment security to new levels. 

Most importantly this will give the control back in the hands of the customer whilst driving simplicity and transparency as he can now determine and set the amount, velocity etc. of recurring mandates besides even annulling a service whenever required through web-based solutions offered by the banks. The new regulations will bring in uniformity across services while building a ubiquitous platform within the payment eco-system across recurring mandates.”

Anand Kumar Bajaj, Founder, MD & CEO, PayNearby

“Earlier, consumers used to complete their transactions at multiple consumption points for e-commerce or food ordering services. But now with the new regulations being effective from 1st October, payment transactions pertaining to recurring payments using cards, will have to be routed through the issuer Bank. Consumers who have completed the registration process advised by RBI will not face any issues on recurring mandates. While this may seem a little inconvenient from the consumer perspective, it is a welcome move by the Regulator and is in the interest of the consumers.

India is the only country to offer PIN on cards at the POS terminal and OTP for an online transaction but with rising digital payments vulnerability to cyberattacks and digital frauds has also been rising incrementally. Therefore, even as we work towards promoting digital payments, it is also important that we strengthen the infrastructure to make it secure. Therefore, now is the best time to infuse regulatory control as it will safeguard customer data and avoid digital frauds, especially in the case of gullible customers who often fall prey to data breaches. Users need to review all their recurring payments and register them with their banks by offering standing instructions to their respective banks. Consumers also need to be aware that the new guidelines will not impact any recurring transactions under UPI, AutoPay and e-NACH."

Let us know in case if you need additional inputs would be happy to facilitate an interaction with the above spokespersons.