RTGS services to be unavailable for 14 hours today, here's why

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has announced that the Real-Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) fund transfer facility will not be available for 14 hours on Sunday (April 18).

The central bank has stated that the facility will be unavailable due to technical upgrade of RTGS system.

RTGS facility will not be available from midnight to 2 pm on Sunday (April 18). 

“A technical upgrade of RTGS, targeted to enhance the resilience and to further improve the Disaster Recovery Time of the RTGS system, is scheduled after the close of business of April 17, 2021,” RBI said in a press release.

However, the central bank has clarified that NEFT services will continue to function during the said period. Accordingly, RTGS service will not be available from 00:00 hrs to 14.00 hrs on Sunday, April 18, 2021. The NEFT system will continue to be operational as usual during this period.

RBI has asked all the member banks to inform their customers of the same so that payment operations can be planned accordingly.

The central bank on April 7 had permitted direct membership of of non-bank payment system operators in the Centralised Payment Systems (CPS). RTGS and NEFT faculties were allowed only for banking entities till now, however, it will not be extended to card networks, white label ATM (WLA) operators, prepaid payment instruments (PPI) issuers and Trade Receivables Discounting System (TReDS) platforms.

According to RBI, the move is intended to encourage the participation of non-banks across payments systems.