Mumbai: Bank accountholders will soon be able to make cardless withdrawals from any ATM using the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) platform. While some banks already allow cardless withdrawals, with the RBI’s directive they will now have to enable cardless withdrawal transactions for other banks’ customers as well.
“At present, the facility of cardless cash withdrawal through ATMs is limited only to a few banks. It is now proposed to make cardless cash withdrawal facility available across all banks and ATM networks using the UPI,” RBI governor Shakktanta Das said. He added that in addition to enhancing the ease of transactions, the absence of the need for a physical card for such transactions would help prevent frauds such as card skimming and cloning.
The clarified that this did not mean that banks would stop reducing the issuance of debit cards that could be used for offline or international transactions. “This move will be highly favored by youngsters, who use phones to make all digital payments using UPI instead of a debit card,” said Mandar Agashe, founder, Sarvatra Technologies, which is a UPI technology enabler to cooperative banks. However, some see the push to UPI impacting the card business for banks, which generates higher fees.
