New directions from Reserve Bank of India (RBI) making bulk clearing facility available round the clock and raising interchange fees have come into effect from August 1, Sunday. The changes will affect a wide range of financial transactions, including salary and pension payments, EMIs and ATM withdrawals.
The central bank had raised interchange fee for financial transactions in June to help banks meet the costs of ATM deployment and maintenance. The new rates were increased to ₹17 from ₹15. Meanwhile, interchange fee for non-financial transactions will now be ₹6 instead of ₹5.
The last change in interchange fee happened in August 2012. Under the new rules, customers can conduct five free transactions, both financial and non-financial, from ATMs of their banks. For other banks, they will be allowed to make three transactions for free in metro centres and five transactions without charges in non-metro centres.
Beyond the free transactions limit, bank can charge the customer up to ₹20 per transaction. RBI has said that lenders will be allowed to increase customer charges to ₹21 per transaction, "to compensate the banks for the higher interchange fee and given the general escalation in costs", from January 1, 2022.
These charges will also apply to cash recycler machines, other than for cash deposit transactions.
An interchange fee is a fee charged by banks to the merchant who processes a credit card or debit card payment.
New RBI rules pertaining to National Automated Clearing House (NACH) being made available round-the-clock on all days of the week have also come into effect from today.
NACH is a bulk payment system operated by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) used for one-to-many credit transfers. This includes activities such as payment of salary, pension, dividend and interest. It also facilitates collection of payments related to EMI instalments towards loans, insurance premium, utility bills for electricity, gas, telephone, and water, and investments in mutual funds.
So far NACH has been available only on bank working days, usually between Monday and Friday. Auto-debit instructions by bank account holder were not processed on days the bank holidays and even gazetted holidays. Also, since most companies use NACH for salary credits these also did not happen on bank holidays.
But with the new changes, all the above transactions can be made anytime, any day of the week. After the bi-monthly monetary policy review in June, RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das had announced that in order to further enhance the convenience of customers, the NACH will be available on all days of the week.
"In order to further enhance customer convenience, and to leverage the 24x7 availability of real-time gross settlement (RTGS), NACH which is currently available on bank working days, is proposed to be made available on all days of the week effective from August 1, 2021," Das had said.
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New RBI rules on salary payments, ATM transaction fees effective from today. What it means for you - Mint
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