National Payment Corporation of India (NPCI) today launched the UPI AutoPay feature for recurring payments. With this new facility, customers can enable recurring e-mandate using any UPI application for recurring payments such as mobile bills, electricity bills, EMI payments, entertainment and OTT subscriptions, insurance, mutual funds and loan payments, among others of up to ₹2000. If the amount exceeds ₹2000, customers have to execute every mandate with UPI PIN.

The UPI AutoPay feature will auto-debit accounts for regular payments that have been pre-selected by customers. Eligible UPI-enabled apps will now have a ‘Mandate’ section, through which customers can create, approve, modify, pause as well as revoke auto-debit mandate. NPCI notes that mandates can be set for one-time, daily, weekly, fortnightly, monthly, bi-monthly, quarterly, half-yearly and yearly as well. Users will have to set an authorized date for auto-debit in the ‘Mandate’ section and the money will then be deducted automatically. NPCI notes UPI users can create e-mandate through UPI ID, QR scan, or Intent.

Nandan Nilekani, Co-founder and Non-Executive Chairman of the Board, Infosys, said, “This will act as an impetus to the momentum and volume of transactions that we are already seeing in UPI and allow them to reach the goal of 1 million transactions a day. We have long been planning a digital payments economy and we are now coming towards that with digital payments more than cash withdrawals. As we provide more and more such user-friendly services like UPI AutoPay we will see more and more adoption of digital payments. This is one of the national goals to increase the proportion of digital payments and reduce the amount of cash that we use in our economy.”

NPCI has introduced UPI AutoPay for banks like Axis Bank, Bank of Baroda, HDFC Bank, HSBC Bank, ICICI Bank, IDFC Bank, IndusInd Bank, Paytm Payments Bank, AutoPe-Delhi Metro, AutoPe-Dish TV, CAMS Pay, Furlenco, Growfitter, Policy Bazaar, Testbook.com, The Hindu, Times Prime, Paytm, PayU, RazorPay, among others. YES Bank, State Bank of India, and Jio Payments Bank will introduce UPI AutoPay soon. This feature essentially looks to ease the burden of remembering to pay regular bills every month from a UPI customer.

UPI has become a popular choice for digital transactions in India. The India Digital Payments Report 2019 revealed that UPI facilitated transactions worth Rs. 18,36,000 crores last year, up 214 percent from 2018. “UPI is perhaps the fastest product to hit 1 billion transactions-a-month in 2019 since its inception in August 2016,” the report said.