New Delhi, June 6: The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) on Thursday waived off the National Electronic Funds Transfer (NEFT) and Real Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) transaction charges for all users. The RBI ordered that banks will be required to pass this benefit to all their customers. The Central Bank also cut the repo rate by 25 basis points on Thursday. The repo rate now at 5.75% from 6%. Meanwhile, the reverse repo rate and bank rate adjusted at 5.50 and 6.0 per cent respectively.

In the last month, the RBI had extended the timings for fund transfer through RTGS by one-and-a-half hours to 6 PM for the general public from June 1. Before the change, the timing for any RTGS transaction was till 4:30 PM. Now it has been extended to 6 PM. The final cut-off for inter-bank transactions will be 7:45 PM.

The NEFT and RTGS are popular form of fund transfer. There is no limit for the minimum/maximum for fund transfer. The NEFT, a nation-wide retail payment system facilitating one-to-one funds transfers, is managed by the RBI while the RTGS system is primarily meant for high-value transactions. The minimum amount to be remitted through RTGS is Rs 2 lakh with no maximum limit.

According to reports, under Real Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) System, there is a continuous and real-time settlement of fund-transfers, individually on a transaction by transaction basis (without netting). During his keynote address at NITI Aayog's FinTech Conclave in March this year, RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das had said that the total volume of retail electronic payments witnessed about nine-fold increase over the last five years.

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Jun 06, 2019 12:09 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).