Coming Soon: Speedier NEFT

  Author: Jai Prakash

It might have been status quo as far interest rates are concerned for RBI in the latest policy announcement on April 6. However, for bank customers there was welcome news in the form of speedier NEFT (National Electronic Funds Transfer). In the near future, you can expect to transfer money from your account to another account, whether it is yours or anybody else’s within 30 minutes. That’s down from one hour it takes at the moment.

Much of the reason for the time taken in NEFT is because the clearance is done in batches of settlement cycles. So, when you do an NEFT it gets slotted for clearance in the next settlement cycle. Soon these settlement cycles will be every 30 minutes instead of an hour at the moment. In fact, the number of settlement cycles will be going up from 12 to 23. All this will happening starting 8 am on a given day and be there till 7 pm.  This move shouldn’t surprise anyone since the government has embarked aggressively on encouraging digital payments. The good news, there will be more digital power to you soon.