Inadequate tech at banks to blame for UPI downtimes

Mumbai: Downtime in the UPI payment system is more due to weak technology on the banks‘ side rather than from the National Payments Corp of India (NPCI), the platform that hosts UPI, the RBI governor has said. “In all cases of downtime, we check if there is an outage from the NPCI end, but there is no problem from the NPCI end. The problem is from the bank and their links which may be due to many reasons and we are dealing with it”, said Governor Shaktinata Das at the post policy press meet.

Banking customers are experiencing increasing transactions failure through digital payments at times leading to financial losses. There were complaints that many investment payments did not happen on June 4 when investors wanted to capitalise on the market crash.

The volume of UPI transactions per day is more than 450 million. In May 2024 alone, there were 31 downtime instances from various banks that led to payment gateways being shut for more than 47 hours, according to data from the NPCI.

All regulated entities are required to report their system outages, planned or unplanned. The central bank has been working to reduce downtime instances for a few years and downtime instances have reduced to less than 1%.

“The purpose of the UPI Lite wallet is to reduce the pressure from the banking system, so that UPI payments don’t hit banks’ systems. As the UPI Lite transactions increase, the pressure on banks’ systems will also decrease, so all these efforts are going on because of which downtime will decrease,” said RBI deputy governor T Rabi Sankar.