NPCI plans to enable unified e-mandate tracking for all UPI apps

The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) is planning to allow all UPI third-party payment applications (TPAPs) to show customers' electronic mandates in one place, in a bid to improve the ease of managing these mandates for consumers.

Two senior executives at digital payment companies said NPCI was building an application interface to be made open to all UPI apps. However, if customers want to cancel a subscription or make changes, they will need to visit the app through which the mandate was originally booked.

“The feature is such that all apps will show the list of mandates, but for a transaction they will be redirected to the parent UPI app,” said one of the executives quoted above.


This comes at a time when UPI AutoPay as a feature has rapidly gained momentum, riding on the popularity of UPI in general. Data shared by NPCI showed in May the top 10 banks cumulatively processed around 1.6 billion e-mandate transactions, up almost threefold from a year earlier when the figure stood at 577 million transactions.

Among the banks, State Bank of India, Airtel Payments Bank and Bank of Baroda are some of the largest institutions whose accounts are being used for these UPI e-mandates, data showed.

While UPI AutoPay has grown rapidly, transaction declines have remained a key characteristic of the feature. As per NPCI data, for SBI, the largest remitter bank, only around 30% of transactions get approved, while 70% are declined due to business-related issues such as insufficient balance.

“Consumers have adopted UPI e-mandates well. The system is less glitch-prone compared with card-based mandates, hence NPCI wants to streamline the internal systems and ensure more people take to this service,” said the second person.

Last year, NPCI launched upihelp.npci.org.in, a chatbot-based system that can answer customer queries around e-mandates in a centralised manner. Now, NPCI wants to take a step further by enabling this feature across every UPI TPAP to make managing these mandates easier.

Queries emailed to NPCI remained unanswered.

Overall, NPCI is working to expand UPI use cases as the country’s most popular instant payment mechanism faces challenges of slowing growth and saturation in terms of adoption.

On May 18, ET reported that NPCI was also working on building a common soundbox interface for all UPI TPAPs that offer QR codes at merchant outlets along with soundbox devices that confirm transactions.