If you have a UPI (Unified Payments Interface) account with any of the popular apps such as Google Pay, Phone Pay or Paytm, and have not been able to use it for a year or longer for any reason whatsoever, then it is set to get deactivated from Jan 1 onwards.
This will be done as the follow-up action of NPCI (National Payments Corporation of India) circular that was issued on Nov 7, 2023.
While taking a decision, the payments corporation body attributed the move to inadvertent transfer of money in cases where users change their mobile numbers without removing their earlier numbers from the banking system.
So, the previous number may get issued to a new user.
In other words, a phone number that is registered with a UPI app — when ceases to be operational — stands to get de-activated from the payments app in order to prevent its misuse.
How will deactivation take place?
The process of deactivation will be done by the third-party application providers (TPAP) and PSP (Payment Service Provider) which will identify UPI IDs and associated UPI numbers and phone numbers of customers who have not performed any transaction for one year from their UPI ID.
Following this, the UPI IDs and UPI numbers of these customers will be disabled for inward credit transactions. And then payment service providers will deregister the same phone number from UPI mapper as well.
All the UPI apps such as Google Pay, Paytm, Phone Pay are supposed to implement the same by Dec 31, 2023.
However, customers can then re-register their respective UPI apps for mapper linkage and they can make payments, non-financial transactions using UPI PIN as needed.
While elaborating further on the process, the NPCI’s Nov 7 circular states, “UPI apps will perform requester validation before initiating pay-to-contact/pay to mobile number’. UPI apps will show the customer’s name which has been fetched before initiating the transactions and shall not display the name which has been stored/cached at the app’s end.”
The payments corporation issued instructions to get this implemented by the year-end i.e., Dec 31, 2023.
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Published: 30 Dec 2023, 01:12 PM IST
