The National Payments Corporation of India has sought a third party audit to limit UPI transaction status checks following a series of outages. Banks have also been asked to immediately ensure that measures to limit the ‘‘check transaction’ API usage has been implemented. Meanwhile Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman also issued a call for collective action on Monday — in order to achieve one billion daily transactions within three years.
“Banks shall audit their systems by CERT-in empanelled auditor on an immediate basis, to review the API usage and existing systems behaviour, and annually hereafter,” NPCI said in a circular accessed by Moneycontrol.
Thousands of UPI users have faced transaction failures in recent weeks as the popular payment system suffered technical glitches on three separate occasions within 30 days. The NPCI (which runs the digital payments platform) had blamed endless transaction status checks by banks as the reason for its longest outage in more than three years.
Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Monday urged all stakeholders to work collaboratively to address infrastructure gaps while underscoring the need to target one billion UPI transactions per day within the next two to three years. The review meeting chaired by the Finance Minister assumes greater significance in view of disruptions faced by UPI users in the recent past due to a spate of outages. The FM had also directed the NPCI to “reinforce UPI’s robustness and prevent future disruptions” during the meeting.