New Net banking platform to help RBI track transfers in real time

Mumbai: Banking Connect, a newly launched net banking platform by NPCI Bharat BillPay (NBBL), will enable the Reserve Bank of India to monitor fund transfers in real time, NBBL MD & CEO Noopur Chaturvedi said on Thursday.

The real-time visibility will help the regulator track transactions flowing into sensitive sectors such as cryptocurrency and online gaming. Currently, it can take banks a week to share net-banking transaction data with the RBI, and in some cases, up to a year, she noted.

Chaturvedi said the new system will also help curb fraud by enabling quicker action against suspicious transfers. However, social engineering frauds—where customers are tricked into sharing personal information—will remain difficult to eliminate completely, she added.

Banking Connect was created to plug gaps in existing payment systems, especially since net banking is still largely used for merchant payments.

The platform offers features such as interoperability and a mobile-first design. Six banks and several payment aggregators have already joined, and efforts are underway to onboard the top five banks by net-banking volume within a month. NBBL, a wholly owned subsidiary of the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), launched Banking Connect last month.

Chaturvedi also outlined NBBL’s goal of scaling monthly bill-payment volumes nearly fourfold—from 260 million to 1 billion—over the next four years. Around 70 million households currently use the bill-payment system, and the target is to more than double this to over 135 million, or roughly half of all Indian households.

She said net-banking usage stands at around 80 million customers, who conduct about 300 monthly transactions worth over Rs 6 lakh crore. While UPI continues to grow rapidly, net banking has expanded only in single digits, she added.