All ATMs To Soon Support Cardless Cash Withdrawal

Synopsis - Currently, only a few banks offer this service to their customers who can avail of it from the ATM of their respective banks. The move will reportedly bring ease to transactions and will also help in preventing frauds related to cards such as card skimming or card cloning.

Giving a major relief to bank customers, India’s central bank, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has announced that people willing to withdraw cash from ATMs will no longer require ATM cards in the upcoming months. Rather, the withdrawal will be possible from bank ATMs using the Unified Payment Interface (UPI).

The announcement was made by RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das at the RBI’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC). Cardless cash withdrawal is one of the key decisions made by the committee. The service will be made available to all the ATM card users of all the banks.

Currently, only a few banks offer this service to their customers who can avail of it from the ATM of their respective banks. The move will reportedly bring ease to transactions and will also help in preventing frauds related to cards such as card skimming or card cloning.

The banks that currently offer cardless cash withdrawals to their customers with no requirement of a card include ICICI Bank, Kotak Mahindra Bank, HDFC Bank, and State Bank of India (SBI). Currently, the bank ATMs that provide cardless withdrawal facilities, require the customer to enter OTP (One-Time Password) received on their registered mobile numbers.

The central bank is expected to release detailed guidelines very shortly to the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), ATM networks, and banks in order to bring clarification regarding the rolling out of the services nationwide.

Das was announcing the bi-monthly monetary policies while he announced the service of cardless transactions. He said that in order to promote the cardless cash withdrawal services, customer authorization using UPI will be done.

The RBI Governor mentioned, 

To encourage card-less cash withdrawal facility across all banks and all ATM networks & operators, it is proposed to enable customer authorization through the use of Unified Payments Interface (UPI) while settlement of such transactions would happen through the ATM networks.

He also noted that currently, the availability of cardless cash withdrawals using ATMs is limited to some banks. He added, “At present, the facility of card-less cash withdrawal through ATMs is limited only to a few banks. It is now proposed to make card-less cash withdrawal facility available across all banks and ATM networks using the UPI.”

Additionally, the central committee of six members kept the repo rate unchanged at 4 percent, and the reverse repo rate also remained unchanged at 3.35 percent through unanimous voting.