UPI transactions costing banks about 21k cr annually, says NPCI CEO Asbe

MUMBAI: UPI’s new merchant fee is intended to recover some of the cost that the payments system has so far absorbed. Dilip Asbe, MD & CEO of NPCI, put the annual cost to the banking system at about Rs 21,000 crore, including Rs 2,000 crore to Rs 3,000 crore for SBI. In a fireside chat with SBI DMD Chander Shekhar Sharma at the SBI Banking and Economic Conclave, the NPCI chief said that the costs of technology have risen, with servers which cost Rs 20 lakh last year now costing Rs 1 crore. He added that NPCI has exhausted most of its technology budget having met only a fourth of its requirements. Bankers say that besides the load on the core banking and storage systems, every account-to-account transfer requires banks to send out alert messages for every transaction. TNN