RBI sets up panel to track online payment frauds; AP Hota to head committee

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has set up a committee with industry participation to help build a digital public infrastructure platform specialised to tackle the issue of frauds, two people in the know told ET.

The committee will also suggest means through which the platform will check frauds in the digital payments ecosystem and suggest fraud mitigation measures, they said.

The panel will be chaired by Abhaya Hota who played a key role in transforming India into a digital economy as the first chief executive officer of National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI).


Members of the panel would include representatives of NPCI, State Bank of India, HDFC Bank and ICICI Bank.

From the payments industry, Vipin Surelia, head of risk at Visa, Arif Khan, chief innovation officer at Razorpay, Jitendra Gupta, founder of Jupiter, and Pranay Jhaveri, managing director of Euronet, have been appointed as members of this committee, people cited above said.

The platform will define the operational parameters and processes that will determine the extent to which data will be provided by reporting entities like banks and fintechs. The committee will have to specify these parameters.

The committee will also define the modalities for identifying transactions as fraudulent ones. Such transactions will then be reported to the Central Payments Fraud Information Repository (CPFIR).

The panel will work out the cost requirements and recommend ways through which the platform can become financially sustainable.

The committee will recommend guardrails to ensure customer data remains safe through the process.

This committee has been set up at a time when the regulator is stepping up its game to combat fraud in digital banking.

In its FY24 annual report, the central bank said around 36,000 cases of fraud were reported to the RBI compared to around 9,000 in FY22, a jump of 300%.

Besides formation of the committee, the banking regulator is also evaluating a risk-based authentication mechanism by leveraging behavioural biometrics, location and in-app notifications, moving beyond the commonly used SMS-based one-time password (OTP).

It further noted that private sector banks reported the most fraud cases while public sector banks accounted for the highest value of frauds.

The majority of these frauds have occurred in the digital payments category.