No RTGS service for 14 hours on Apr 18, NEFT will be operational: RBI

RBI urged the member banks to inform their customers to plan their payment operations accordingly

RTGS services will be unavailable for 14 hours from 00:00 to 14:00 hours on Sunday (April 18) as there will be a technical upgrade to enhance the resilience of the system.

"A technical upgrade of RTGS, targeted to enhance the resilience and to further improve the Disaster Recovery Time of the RTGS system, is scheduled after the close of business of April 17, 2021," the Reserve Bank of India said.

"Accordingly, RTGS service will not be available from 00:00 hrs to 14.00 hrs on Sunday, April 18, 2021," it said. 

However, the NEFT system will continue to be operational as usual during this period. The Central bank asked the member banks to inform their customers to plan their payment operations accordingly.

RTGS Members will continue to receive event update(s) through system broadcasts.

In a major move, the RBI had last week decided to allow payment system operators to take direct membership of Centralised Payment Systems (CPS), such as RTGS and NEFT.

Membership in Centralised Payment Systems (CPS) -- RTGS and NEFT -- for entities other than banks were earlier limited to banks, with a few exceptions, such as specialised entities like clearing corporations and select development financial institutions.