Kamal Ghorui
MUMBAI: The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) wants the payments industry to move towards an interoperable system that allows customers to view all mandates across payment instruments, whether UPI or credit cards, in a single interface. The central bank wants to position it as a key customer protection measure at a time when subscription-based services are proliferating and making it harder for users to track recurring outflows.Speaking at an event organised by the Merchant Payments Alliance of India, RBI executive director P Vasudevan said in UPI alone, about 87 crore mandates, or standing instructions for recurring payments, were created in Feb 2026. While UPI already provides a facility for users to view mandates in one place, he underlined the need to extend such visibility across all payment instruments and platforms.“I might have created mandates across aggregators, can I get a bird’s eye view? Imagine I also get a bird’s eye view across systems. I might have done something on UPI, I might have done something on say Mastercard, Visa. Can I get a bird’s eye view in one place so that I can easily continue or not?,” said Vasudevan.He said RBI is working on a Digital Payments Intelligence Platform that can generate real-time risk scores for transactions. It is also expanding the digital public infrastructure stack across payments, lending and identity, including the Unified Lending Interface, while exploring tokenisation beyond cards into areas such as KYC and financial instruments. Among other initiatives underway, the RBI is working on AI-driven systems, such as UPI Help for automated grievance handling, MuleHunter for identifying mule accounts. He emphasised that interoperability should remain the “mool mantra” of the payments ecosystem, urging industry participants to bring together disparate systems to deliver a seamless customer experience rather than forcing users to navigate multiple platforms for mandates, subscriptions and grievances. The central bank’s push comes amid rapid growth in digital payments and a shift towards merchant payments, with UPI increasingly being used for transactions .The regulator is also pushing for deeper use of artificial intelligence across the payments ecosystem, but cautioned against mechanical or rule-based deployments that could end up increasing friction. Systems should be context-aware , improving fraud detection , he said.
