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There is a lot of scope and opportunity for expanding digital payment in the country and UPI has the potential to more than double to 1 billion users from the current base of 400 million, Reserve Bank Deputy Governor T Rabi Sankar said on Tuesday. About 50 per cent of global retail payment transactions are done in India but even then in terms of the number of digital transactions per person, it has to catch up with many advanced economies. Citing an example of Kenya, the RBI Deputy Governor said, digital transaction per person in Kenya is roughly double than what India has. The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), an RBI-0promoted body which created and operates UPI, had launched a USSD-based service to enable UPI access for feature phone users, within months of the launch of the main platform for smartphone users in 2016. " The active users of UPI are about 400 million. We are targeting 1 billion users. So...there is a lot of scope, there is a lot of distance that we nee
Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Deputy Governor Swaminathan J has asked banks to put in place stronger operational discipline and data governance throughout the year, as supervision needs to shift from periodic snapshots to continuous awareness. Speaking on 'Issues and Challenges in Banking Supervision in the Digital Era', the deputy governor said for decades, supervisors were trained to read balance sheets and inspect processes, and it is still being done the same way. But today, he said a bank can look perfectly healthy on paper and still be one incident away from severe disruption. "The reason is that the centre of gravity is shifting from the 'branch and product' to the 'pipes and code'," he said. In other words, stability now depends as much on operational resilience, data integrity, and third-party dependencies as much as it does on capital and liquidity, Swaminathan said at the at the Third Annual Global Conference of the College of Supervisors here on Friday. In a digital ...
The Reserve Bank on Friday fixed the Ways and Means Advances (WMA) limit for the Delhi government at Rs 890 crore to help it meet any temporary mismatch in receipts and payments. Earlier this week, the central bank entered into an agreement with the Government of the National Capital Territory of Delhi (GNCTD) to conduct the city government's general banking business, effective from Friday, January 09, 2026. "The WMA limit for GNCTD has been fixed at Rs 890 crore, effective from January 09, 2026," the Reserve Bank of India said in a statement. Accordingly, the revised aggregate WMA limit for State Governments / Union Territories will be Rs 61,008 crore as against the existing limit of Rs 60,118 crore, it added. WMA are temporary advances given by the RBI to the central, state governments and Union Territories to tide over any mismatch in receipts and payments.
Making a case for status quo on interest rate by the RBI, PwC Partner and Economic Advisory Services leader Ranen Banerjee said that any cut at this time would amount to "wasting a bullet" in an environment when growth is robust and inflation is benign. The Reserve Bank is unlikely to cut key policy rate in the next Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) meeting next month, he said. The meeting of MPC headed by Reserve Bank Governor Sanjay Malhotra is scheduled for February 4-6, 2026. This will be the last meeting of the current fiscal. If the growth numbers are holding up and base year revision is also on the anvil, which is expected to provide better estimates, then there is no need for rate cut, he told PTI. Observing that private capex is not interest rate sensitive, Banerjee said, there will be pick up when capacity utilisation is close to 85 per cent. "I do not think that the private capex is held up because of the interest rate. It is because there is an uncertainty of demand or t