RBI ups the limit of UPI Lite to Rs 500, Conversational and offline NFC payments introduced

Reserve Bank of India (RBI) on Monday announced three major changes coming to UPI. This includes the upraise of UPI lite limit for a single transaction, offline UPI transactions via NFC, and conversational transactions.

UPI Lite now supports payments of up to Rs 500

RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das in a press release revealed that it’s upgrading the UPI experience for users. Especially for small-value transactions. UPI Lite’s limit has now been raised to Rs 500. For the uninitiated, the previous limit was Rs 200. What this means is that users can send up to Rs 500 without putting their UPI PIN.

It is worth noting that the maximum deposit limit for UPI Lite is still Rs 2,000. That said, you can deposit Rs 2,000 and then spend up to Rs 500 per transaction. Users can deposit Rs 2,000 twice daily. So to make it clear users can cumulatively spend up to Rs 4,000 in 24 hours.

UPI Lite transactions do not get reflected in your bank statement since they are done via a separate wallet, i.e. UPI Lite. The entries, however, will be recorded in the UPI Lite transaction history. This will ensure that your bank statement does not have numerous small-value transactions.

Offline UPI Lite payments via NFC

RBI also confirmed that UPI Lite will be getting support for offline payments via NFC (Near-field communication). Those with NFC support on their phone will be able to use this feature. How it may work is that users could be able to simply their phone on the NFC tag and the amount will be sent to the other party. This will work without an Internet connection.

Conversational UPI

RBI has proposed to enable conversational payments using new technology on UPI, which means going forward, we may see an AI-powered UPI system for doing payments. This feature is yet to be approved and rolled out.