Your auto payments for phone bills, OTT subscriptions may fail in April

Transactions worth more than Rs 2,000 cr expected to be affected as RBI refuses more time to comply with new pre-debit notification rule

People who have set up recurring auto-debit transactions to pay bills for phone, internet, video streaming and other online services are likely to see the payments fail from April 1 due to the Reserve Bank of India's (RBI) March 31 deadline to banks for putting in place a security measure called Additional Factor Authentication (AFA).

The move is set to affect only recurring debit and credit card payments. UPI-based auto-debit transactions will not be affected.

Additional Factor Authentication requires banks to push a notification to customers five days ahead of when the payment is set to take place.