The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) has mandated a reduction in the number of UPI (Unified Payments Interface) payments to 10 from one bank account.

The NPCI circular said 10 transactions per bank account only for the person-to-person (P2P) segment in a day, where the timestamp of the first transaction will be considered as the start time, will be allowed. Earlier, the transfer limit was 20.

The new changes came into effect on October 21, 2018. The NPCI said the new rule is 'to encourage genuine transactions' on the platform. The amount of money that can be transferred using the UPI platform remains between Rs 1 and Rs 1,00,000.

Here's What It Means

The NPCI has limited the number of transactions only on the P2P transactions. The person-to-person segment is the transfer of funds between two individuals, where the payer can transfer from their bank account to the payee individual's account.

Since the number of transactions is only limited to this segment, the individual will not be restricted to use the UPI platform to make online payments to a merchant that is, food delivery apps, etailers, among others.

However, the restriction is likely to be imposed on the payments made via UPI to small vendors as there is a chance that the vendors are using their personal account for receiving the payment.

The norm suggests that only 10 bank transactions will be allowed per bank account and not the individual, that is, if the same individual has more than one bank account in different bank accounts, the individual will be allowed to make 10 bank transfers each depending on how many bank accounts he or she has.

However, if the individual is using the same bank account for the UPI bank transfers but on various apps such as Paytm, Google Pay, etc., the transactions will be limited to 10 for 24 hours.

(Picture credits: ICICI Bank)