NPCI to enable e-mandate tracking on all UPI apps
What's the story
The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) is working on a new feature to simplify the management of electronic mandates for consumers. The move will allow all third-party Unified Payments Interface (UPI) payment applications to show customers' electronic mandates in one place. This comes as part of NPCI's efforts to streamline the rapidly growing UPI AutoPay feature, which has seen a threefold increase in transactions over the past year.
User experience
How the new interface will work
NPCI is developing an application interface that will be made available to all UPI apps. The feature will show a list of mandates on all apps but redirect users to the parent UPI app for transactions. However, if customers want to cancel a subscription or make changes, they will still have to visit the app where the mandate was originally booked.
Growth statistics
Surge in e-mandate transactions
The NPCI data shows that the top 10 banks processed around 1.6 billion e-mandate transactions in May. This is almost three times the number from a year ago when it stood at 577 million transactions. Among these banks, State Bank of India (SBI), Airtel Payments Bank, and Bank of Baroda are some of the largest institutions whose accounts are being used for these UPI e-mandates.
Approval challenges
Addressing transaction declines
Despite the rapid growth of UPI AutoPay, transaction declines remain a major issue. According to NPCI data, only around 30% of transactions are approved for SBI, the largest remitter bank. The remaining 70% are declined due to business-related issues such as insufficient balance. This is a challenge that NPCI is looking to address with its new unified e-mandate tracking feature across all UPI TPAPs.
Customer support
Broader strategy to expand UPI use cases
Last year, NPCI launched a chatbot-based system called upihelp.npci.org.in to answer customer queries about e-mandates in a centralized manner. Now, the organization wants to extend this feature across every UPI TPAP to make managing these mandates easier. This is part of NPCI's broader strategy to expand UPI use cases amid challenges of slowing growth and saturation in terms of adoption.