RBI flags bank tech resilience as a board-level risk as UPI dependence deepens
Deputy Governor Rohit Jain said banks must strengthen resilience across payment rails, cloud and fintech dependencies. For retailers, the warning underscores the need for payment-routing backups and outage playbooks as UPI transaction volumes continue to scale.
What happened
Reserve Bank of India (RBI) · RBI Deputy Governor Rohit Jain urged banks to treat technology resilience as a board-level risk, citing dependencies across
Key facts
- UPI processed 24.9 billion transactions
- UPI transaction value was approximately Rs 30 lakh crore
- August 2026
- 2024 CrowdStrike disruption
Why this matters
Prioritize partnerships or acquisitions that reduce dependence on single payment rails, including orchestration, failover, offline payments and merchant incident-management capabilities.
What to watch
- RBI circulars or supervisory comments specifying operational-resilience, outsourcing, cloud-risk, cyber-resilience or recovery-time expectations for banks and payment participants.
- UPI transaction failure-rate spikes, extended bank-side outages, delayed reversals or recurring disruption at major PSPs and acquiring banks.
- Banks requiring merchants or payment aggregators to complete enhanced business-continuity, vendor-risk or disaster-recovery attestations.
- NPCI changes to routing, failover, transaction limits, availability reporting or contingency processes.
- Higher payment-gateway pricing, new redundancy fees, or acquiring-bank restrictions tied to risk and uptime standards.
- Public disclosures of cloud concentration incidents or fintech/vendor outages affecting multiple banks or merchants.
- Map payment dependencies by store, app and checkout flow, including UPI PSPs, acquiring banks, gateway providers, cloud hosts and reconciliation vendors.
- Implement payment orchestration with automatic routing among multiple UPI PSPs/acquirers and clear customer-facing fallback options for cards, cash, QR alternatives and pay-later methods.
- Define outage playbooks covering store operations, customer messaging, order holds, manual reconciliation, fraud controls and escalation contacts at each payment partner.
- Measure authorization success, UPI collect/intent failure rates, latency and reversal times by provider and geography; set thresholds for automated traffic shifting.
- Review contracts for uptime SLAs, incident notification, compensation, data portability, disaster recovery testing and subcontractor/cloud disclosure.
- Elevate payment continuity to board or risk-committee reporting, particularly for retailers where digital payments account for a material share of sales.