NPCI Plans to Tighten Rules on UPI Collect and Autopay to Combat Rising Fraud

As India’s real-time payments infrastructure scales to unprecedented volumes, regulators are beginning to address risks that emerge only at maturity. As per news reports, the National Payments Corporation of India has started reviewing select UPI features to determine whether certain transaction flows expose users to avoidable losses. 

Focus Shifts from Scale to User Intent 

UPI has become the default payment method across India, handling billions of transactions monthly across retail, services and subscriptions. However, NPCI now believes that speed and simplicity must be balanced with clearer expressions of user intent, especially in payment journeys where the customer does not actively initiate the transaction. 

Discussions with payment intermediaries indicate that 2 features: Collect and Autopay have drawn attention due to repeated instances where users authorised payments without fully understanding the nature of the approval. 

Why Collect and Autopay are Being Reassessed? 

Collect requests allow payments to be triggered by the recipient, while Autopay enables recurring debits after a one-time consent.  

While both features helped expand digital subscriptions and remote payments, they also reduced friction to a point where consent signals became less explicit. 

It is reported that a portion of complaints stem from approvals that did not clearly distinguish between one-time payments and ongoing mandates.  

NPCI is therefore considering narrowing the use of Collect in certain merchant-linked person-to-person flows where misuse has been more common. 

Design, Not Fraud, At the Core of the Problem 

Officials involved in the review emphasise that the issue is not systemic fraud alone, but design ambiguity. In high-speed payment systems like UPI, even small interface gaps can produce significant cumulative losses. 

As part of the review, NPCI is expected to push for clearer disclosures for Autopay mandates, including payment frequency, duration and total exposure, before consent is granted.  

Payment firms believe this could reduce disputes without dismantling the subscription ecosystem built on UPI. 

Implications for Merchants and Platforms 

Any tightening of Collect usage may require merchants to shift towards customer-initiated flows such as QR payments or explicit subscription authorisations.  

While this could affect some remote collection models, intermediaries broadly agree that clearer consent standards are overdue. 

NPCI is expected to introduce changes gradually, allowing platforms and merchants time to adjust without disrupting transaction volumes. 

Read More: PayNearby Receives NPCI Nod as UPI Third Party App, Launches Saathi App! 

Conclusion 

The review of Collect and Autopay marks a shift in UPI’s evolution from rapid adoption to design-led regulation. As digital payments become infrastructure-level utilities, embedding clarity into user consent may prove critical to preserving trust at scale. 

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