New Delhi: The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) has decided to apply Prepaid Payment Instrument (PPI) charges for all UPI (Unified Payments Interface) transactions from April 1.
An interchange fee ranging of up to 1.1 per cent will be applicable on merchant UPI transactions of prepaid payment instruments if the transaction is more than Rs 2,000, the NPCI said in a notification.
The charges are applicable only for prepaid payment instruments like wallet and credit cards. Some PPIs in India, include Paytm, PhonePe, and Google Pay.
While the interchange fee is 0.7 per cent for telecom, education and utilities, it is 0.9 per cent for supermarkets. Insurance, government, mutual funds and railways will be levied a charge of 1 per cent.
The interchange fee is typically associated with card payments and is levied to cover the costs of accepting, processing and authorising transactions.
Interchange will not be applied in the case of peer-to-peer (P2P) and peer-to-peer-merchant (P2PM) transactions, meaning the normal UPI payments in shops and transfer between two individuals will not attract the new charges.