RBI: Banks should not charge for inoperative savings accounts without a minimum balance

In a recent development the RBI has asked banks not to implement penalties on consumers, who don’t have a minimum balance in their inoperative account.

The measure has come as a big relief for consumers as they were charged penalties by banks for their dormant bank accounts.

“It is advised that henceforth banks are not permitted to levy penal charges for non-maintenance of minimum balances in any inoperative account,” RBI said in a notification. Several banks, including the State Bank of India, do not levy any charge if the minimum balance is not maintained in an inoperative savings account.

In the first bi-monthly monetary policy statement for 2014-15 released last month, the RBI had said banks should also not take undue advantage of customer difficulty or inattention.

“Instead of levying penal charges for non maintenance of minimum balance in ordinary savings bank accounts, banks should limit services available on such accounts to those available to basic savings bank deposit accounts and restore the services when the balances improve to the minimum required level,” the report said.

Courtesy: PTI 

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ATM transaction charge is not going to increase: NPCI

In a big relief to consumers, The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) said that they are keen going to hike the ATM transaction charge in spite of bank urging NPCI to increase the charge due to increase in security costs.

 A P Hota, MD & CEO of NPCI, while speaking to media, said, “We are not going for an increase in charges at this stage although banks have been requesting for a revision of charges. In a large number of ATMs, there already are guards and most of the machines already have CCTVs.”

Banks have demand for increase, explaining that hiring guards for three shifts would cost at least Rs 30,000 per month. Considering the average transactions number 150 per day and about 4,500 transactions per month, the cost of an average transaction comes up to Rs 6.6.

While presently banks pay each other Rs 15 for cash withdrawal from their ATM by non-customers. RBI restricts banks from passing the charge to the customer for five transactions a month for an amount of up to Rs 10,000.

Banks are looking at cutting costs by shutting few ATMs at night. Besides cutting cost of acquiring the ATMs, the move is believed to cut down operating costs too.

“The Aadhaar Mapper located at NPCI has close to five crore Aadhaar numbers mapped to various banks and government departments make payments to about five lakh beneficiaries each day using just the Aadhaar number as the address,” adds Hota.

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