To curb fraud, NPCI limits daily UPI P2P transactions to 10 per account

In a new circular, the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) has cut the number of P2P transactions allowed from a single bank account to 10 over 24 hours. The timestamp of the first transaction will be considered as the start time. Earlier, users could make up to 20 such transactions.

The circular, dated October 21, also stated that this is ‘inclusive to only for P2P transactions originating from a unique bank account’ and does not apply to merchant transactions. According to the NPCI, the move is expected to encourage genuine transactions in the UPI ecosystem and bring in rationality.

This is not the first time the NPCI has taken steps to curb artificial transactions on the UPI network. Effective August 1, the payments organisation in a circular to banks stated that transactions, where the source and destination of the UPI payment is the same bank account, will be blocked.

Experts from the payments industry were of a view that in order to benefit from various incentivisation schemes from third-party apps, users tried to game the system by creating multiple VPAs on different payment apps with the same underlying bank account.

With the money being debited and then credited back to the same account through two different VPAs, customers get cashbacks for performing transactions.

As of last month, the NPCI reported that total Unified Payments Interface (UPI) transactions in the country for September stood at 405.87 million, up 30 percent from August, when the total number of transactions was around 312 million.

The total value of the transactions during September was around Rs 59,835 crore. In August, this number stood at Rs 54,212 crore.