New Delhi: The International Monetary Fund titled and they announced titled of Growing Retail Digital Payments: The Value of Interoperability, India has emerged as the global leader in fast payments, largely driven by the success of the Unified Payments Interface (UPI). The UPI, which was launched in 2016 by the National Payments Corporation of India, known in short as NPCI, has changed how people send and receive money in the country.
They have set some latest rules in UPI, which are applied from today itself; these new rules will further enhance system performance and reduce fraud risks across the country. In a circular which is issued on May 21, 2025, NPCI stated that PSP Banks and acquiring banks shall ensure all the API requests sent to the UPI are monitored and moderated in terms of appropriate usage, customer-initiated and PSP system-initiated.
Customers will be allowed to check their account balance through UPI applications up to a maximum of 50 times per app per day. This means each UPI application can be used up to 50 times in 24 hours for a balance check. This will allow users to request the status of the transaction. Under the new rules, the users may initiate the transaction status after 45 to 60 seconds of the initiation and authentication of the original transaction.
The users can execute UPI autopay mandates such as electricity bills, water bills, OTT subscriptions, etc.., only during non-peak hours. Peak hours are defined as the period during the day when the UPI financial transactions reach the highest transactions per second, observed from 10:00 hours to 13:00 hours and from 17:00 hours to 21:30 hours. Any other time shall be referred to as non-peak hour. During the peak hours, UPI members are required to restrict non-customer-initiated APIs, as stated by the NPCI.
It also allows users to find the links to accounts linked to their mobile by a particular account provider. Now, the customers can view their bank accounts only 25 times per application in 24 hours.
