RBI To The Rescue

Arjavi Indraneesh discusses RBI’s TAT mechanism and compensation in the wake of increasing transaction failures and resulting adversity on customer’s account

- Arjavi Indraneesh

It would be hard to spot even one person who hasn’t had a bad experi-ence with an ATM transaction, payment at the point of sale (PoS) machine or online payment. There are frequent incidents where while withdrawing cash from an ATM, the message from the bank arrives on the phone informing that money has been deducted from the account but no cash comes out of the ATM.

Another frequent problem is that the website where one may be making online payment freezes at the point when the server on the payment side was about to send the request to the merchant’s website. There again, the money gets deducted from the account but the message arrives says that the transaction has failed.

In an even more disturbing instance, while booking an airline ticket, the money has been deducted from the bank but the booking has not been done as the merchant has not received the payment, leaving the customer in a lurch and wondering about the whereabouts of the money.

It appears that at last there is some hope coming along. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has decided to put in place a framework for harmonisation of Turn Around Time (TAT) and customer compensation for failed transactions using all authorised payment systems.