The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) plans to make the online payment system, the National Electronic Funds Transfer (NEFT), available 24×7, in what may provide a boost to the government’s digital payments plan. At present, transfer of funds via NEFT is dependent on bank working hours. The facility of electronic transfer of funds is available from 8.00 am to 7.00 pm on all working days of the week, except the second and fourth Saturdays in a month.“As mentioned in the Payment System Vision 2021 document, the Reserve Bank will make available the NEFT system on a 24×7 basis from December 2019. This is expected to revolutionise the retail payments system of the country,” the RBI said in a release on Wednesday. The banking regulator had last month scrapped the levy on online transactions such as NEFT to make transfer of funds cheaper. The banking regulator also proposed creation of a Central Payment Fraud Registry that will track banking fraud. Currently, there is a mechanism in place for banks to report banking fraud to the Central Fraud Monitoring Cell of the RBI.
