RBI flags resilience, fraud controls as UPI becomes core commerce infrastructure
RBI Deputy Governor Shirish Chandra Murmu said UPI’s scale raises fresh priorities around operational resilience, cybersecurity, fraud prevention and customer protection. The central bank is developing a Digital Payments Intelligence Platform and reviewing feedback on its digital-payment fraud paper.
What happened
RBI Deputy Governor Shirish Chandra Murmu flagged operational resilience, cybersecurity, fraud prevention and customer protection as critical priorities as UPI
Key facts
- FY 2025-26: 24,162 crore UPI transactions
- FY 2025-26: ₹314 lakh crore UPI transaction value
- UPI accounted for about 85% of India’s digital-payment transaction volume
- India accounts for close to half of global real-time payment transactions
- Payment systems operate 24x7x365
Why this matters
Prioritize partnerships or acquisitions in fraud intelligence, cybersecurity, transaction monitoring and payment-recovery tools as banks and merchants prepare for stricter safeguards around UPI.
What to watch
- RBI launch timeline, governance model and participant requirements for the Digital Payments Intelligence Platform.
- Final recommendations from RBI's digital-payment fraud consultation, including liability, reporting and data-sharing rules.
- Mandated fraud-reporting windows, customer-compensation standards or enhanced authentication requirements.
- UPI outage frequency, transaction failure rates and public incident disclosures from banks, PSPs and payment aggregators.
- Growth in merchant-side fraud, refund abuse, mule-account activity and social-engineering scam complaints.
- Changes in payment-aggregator licensing, merchant due-diligence requirements or cyber-resilience audits.
- Audit UPI payment flows for failure handling, duplicate-debit resolution, refund timing and outage communication.
- Increase fraud controls around account changes, high-value orders, gift cards, refunds, loyalty-point redemption and buy-online-pickup-in-store orders.
- Require payment partners to provide real-time fraud alerts, transaction-status APIs, incident SLAs, reconciliation support and redundancy plans.
- Build risk-based rather than universal checkout friction, using device, account-age, behavioral and order signals to trigger step-up checks.
- Prepare customer-support scripts and self-service tools for payment holds, failed debits, disputed transactions and scam-reporting escalation.
- Review exposure to concentrated UPI providers and establish fallback acceptance options where commercially viable.