New Delhi: Unified Payments Interface (UPI) has made digital transactions in India quicker and more convenient than ever. Now, starting June 16, sending and receiving money will become even faster. Along with this upgrade, several other key features—like balance checks and auto-payment mandates—are set to undergo changes which will roll out after July.
The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) which manages UPI, announced in a circular dated April 26, 2025 that it is working to make UPI transactions even faster. The move aims to improve overall performance and will benefit remitter banks, beneficiary banks, and popular payment apps like PhonePe, Google Pay, and Paytm.
In the circular, NPCI stated, “[The] Aforementioned revisions are intended to improve the customer experience. The members are required to ensure that they make the necessary changes in their system so that responses are handled within the revised time. If the members have any dependency/configuration changes at partner /merchant’s end, then the same also has to be taken care of accordingly.”
More important changes are on the way for the UPI system starting August, according to a circular dated May 21, 2025. It stated, “PSP banks and/or acquiring banks shall ensure all the API requests (in terms of velocity and TPS – transactions per second limitations) sent to UPI are monitored and moderated in terms of appropriate usage (customer-initiated and PSP system-initiated).” In simple terms, banks and payment apps will need to carefully manage how many requests they send to UPI to ensure smoother and more efficient transactions.
The new guidelines bring several key changes, covering everything from balance checks to viewing past transactions.
Balance Enquiry:
Users can check their account balance through UPI apps up to 50 times a day, as per the new limit.
List Account Feature:
This feature lets users see all accounts linked to their mobile number with a specific provider. Each user will get 25 requests per app per day.
Autopay Mandate Execution:
– Only 1 attempt and up to 3 retries will be allowed for each autopay mandate.
– These attempts will be made outside of peak hours to avoid system overload.
– Peak hours are defined as 10:00 AM to 1:00 PM and 5:00 PM to 9:30 PM.
