No MDR charges applicable on payment via RuPay, UPI from January: FM

Team Udayavani, Dec 28, 2019, 6:43 PM IST

New Delhi: In a bid to promote digital payments, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Saturday said no MDR charges will be applicable on transactions through homegrown RuPay and UPI platforms beginning January 1, 2020.

Department of Revenue (DoR) will soon notify RuPay and UPI as the prescribed mode of payment for digital transactions without any Merchant Discount Rate (MDR), she said after meeting with CEOs of public sector banks here.

MDR is the cost paid by a merchant to a bank for accepting payment from their customers via digital means. The merchant discount rate is expressed in percentage of the transaction amount.

“After extensive consultation with stakeholders, banks and so on. I’m happy to say that announcement which was made in the budget will see the notification coming on January 1, 2020 whereby those modes which are getting notified will not have charges under the MDR being levied on them,” she said.

Indigenously developed digital payment medium like RuPay and BHIM UPI will now have edge over the payment gateway promoted by foreign companies.

In her Budget speech in July, Sitharaman had proposed that businesses should offer low cost digital modes of payment such as BHIM UPI, UPI QR Code, Aadhaar Pay, Debit Cards, NEFT, RTGS etc. to their customers, and no charge or MDR shall be imposed on customers to promote digital payment.

“I, therefore, propose that the business establishments with annual turnover more than Rs 50 crore shall offer such low-cost digital modes of payment to their customers and no charges or Merchant Discount Rate shall be imposed on customers as well as merchants.

“RBI and banks will absorb these costs from the savings that will accrue to them on account of handling less cash as people move to these digital modes of payment,” she had said.

She further said that all banks will also start a campaign to popularise RuPay Debit card and UPI in order to strengthen the digital payment eco-system and move towards less-cash economy.