New Rule in UPI Payment?

India's digital payments story is built on one promise: speed. Send money, and it reaches the other side instantly. However, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) now wants to introduce a pause -- up to one hour. For certain high-value person-to-person Unified Payment Interface (UPI) and bank account transfers, it wants to introduce a cooling-off period of up to one hour before the transaction actually goes through. The idea is to give users a chance to stop a bad transaction before it's irreversible. Under the proposal, account-to-account transfers above ₹10,000 may face a one-hour delay.Transactions above ₹10,000 account for nearly 98.5% of fraud value, making them a key focus area. According to the National Payments Corporation of India, UPI in India processed over 22.6 billion transactions in March 2026 alone. This figure shows the scale of UPI's penetration in India's financial system.