Tech Giants Brace For Impact in India as New Payments Rule Goes Into Effect

Apple, Google, Sony, Zoom, PayPal and several other tech companies as well as scores of banks have cautioned customers and partners in India to expect a surge in declined transactions as the world's second-largest internet market's central bank enforces a new directive for the way recurring payments are processed in the country. From a report: The Reserve Bank of India's directive, which goes into effect on Friday, requires banks, financial institutions and payment gateways to obtain additional approval for auto-renewables transactions worth over 5,000 Indian rupees ($67) from users by conducting notifications, e-mandates and Additional Factors of Authentication (AFA). The directive impacts all such transactions for debit cards as well as credit cards. The Reserve Bank of India said in the original circular in 2019, that the framework was designed to serve as "a risk mitigant and customer facilitation measure," adding that the issuer processing such transactions "shall send a pre-transaction notification to the customer, at least 24 hours prior to the actual charge by SMS or email, as per the customer's preferences."

weekly billing

[awwshit]

So, if your product costs more than $67/month you switch to weekly billing?

Re:

[suss]

Or just pay them in itunes/play store/etc gift cards. It's been the currency of indian scammers for a while now.

Re:

[Ostracus]

So little difference between a pay-as-you-go except for the digital part.

In May this year, Google stopped on-boarding new recurring payment customers on its Play Store. The company told developers that free trials and introductory pricing should be removed from the apps until “the ecosystem challenges are addressed.” YouTube has moved to support only a prepaid — pay as you go — payments acceptance model for its Premium service.

Re:

[Ostracus]

From the article:

The directive doesn’t impact recurring payments made through UPI, a payments infrastructure built by a coalition of retail banks. Which explains why some firms — including Netflix — have added support for auto-pay on UPI in the country.

Cool beans.

[Ostracus]

In other words reducing abuse by those that have easy access to your account.

Re:

[jellomizer]

The scheduled payment system has really gotten too easy. We have a lot of monthly payments (often for small amounts) that just kinda add up. Giving a bit on inconvenience to re-verify the stuff you are paying for is indeed a good thing. As you may not be needing it.

While I know everyone talks about good economy where people are spending money.... However, a proper good economy has people spending money on things that adds value to them Wasting money is just putting money in the pocket of companies who

Re:

[Ostracus]

Ah, someone who believes in consumer sovereignty. [bu.edu]

Yes and no

[rsilvergun]

it's entirely possible this is a move by the Indian gov't to freeze out payment processors they don't like (both foreign and domestic)

Re: Yes and no

[ami.one]

Nah, you give too much credit to the Govt's hive intelligence:)

Auto pay was getting misused either intentionally or just due to bugs. Almost everyone who uses it has some story when they see a sudden transaction and then it took months to get it reversed.

And almost all apps would keep pestering you with some option box ticked to allow 'one touch' payments and 'auto top-up' (which means transferring money from your bank into that apps wallet which can't be used for anything else. You can manually transfer th

Re:

[mtky]

Exactly. Hopefully other parts of the world will follow suite. Netflix sneakily raised my subscription some time back which went unnoticed for years with me paying 12.99 instead of 8.99 (I think they were the numbers, either that or 11.99 and 7.99). Recently I noticed this and I hadn't even used their service for almost 2 years so I cancelled it. Something like this system in India would likely have brought the scam to my attention much sooner.

I want us to have that too.

[BAReFO0t]

Too many legalized criminals prey on people auto-renewal of contracts with recurring payments.

Re:

[sarren1901]

So sign up to the random services, then cancel and enjoy the rest of the time you have left. Why is this such a hard concept? I would be rather frustrated as a citizen if my government all of a sudden wanted to muck around with our perfectly functioning payment system. I have numerous auto-payments setup and it works great.

If I wanted to do every single payment by hand, I would. That's the point of setting up auto-payments in the first place.

I do have a couple of bills that I pay manually but more then half

Re:

[taustin]

So sign up to the random services, then cancel and enjoy the rest of the time you have left. Why is this such a hard concept?

Because some outfits will ignore the cancellation and keep billing you until the heat death of the universe or the SWAT team kicks in their door, whichever comes last.

Re: I want us to have that too.

[ami.one]

Netflix kept charging me thrice a month for like 6 months till I could get 2 of them cancelled.
Something to do with accounts being treated as separate for email id and phone number when actually they show as collated into 1 account.

Might have been a bug.

Amazon still has an issue like this - I have 1 email ID registered with 2 passwords - entering one pwd logs me in to amazon India and the other pwd logs me in to amazon US/Intl.
I can log into one and still browse to the other site (.in or .com /.us) but when

RBI is absolutely the tits

[bubblyceiling]

The amount of security Indians enjoy in payment systems is quite impressive, all thanks to RBI