The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has recently launched a new real-time system of check clearing. So that now the check payment can be done in a few hours instead of 1-2 days. But in the beginning, many technical and training related problems have come to light in this system, due to which customers are facing problems.
Whereas earlier checks were processed in one go at the end of the day, the system now allows continuous clearing throughout the day. That is, if a check is deposited between 10 am to 4 pm, the bank will immediately scan it and send it to the central system and settlement between the banks will happen every hour. The paying bank has to do the verification by 7 pm, failing which the check is automatically considered passed.
But due to lack of complete training of the new process, the bank staff is facing problems at many places in scanning the cheque, image quality and reading the number correctly. Many times the scanned check images get rejected due to not being clear, due to which customers are getting delayed payments as usual. A private bank official said that there are problems in system integration, number reading and data transfer, due to which the work has slowed down.
A Mumbai-based NBFC company said that they deposited checks worth about Rs 20 crore on Saturday, but the payment did not come to their account even till Thursday. Whereas money has been deducted from the customer’s account. When they contacted the bank, they also did not get a clear answer as to where the money was stuck.
Meanwhile, the RBI on Wednesday extended the check clearing time till 11 pm to clear the stuck transactions. Usually the cutoff timing of the bank is 7 pm.
However, this problem is not visible on a large scale because now most of the people use online payment systems like NEFT, RTGS and especially UPI. According to RBI data, in 2019, where around 450 million checks were cleared every month, now this number has come down to 200-300 million.
Still, customers who have experienced problems have expressed their displeasure on social media. Many users wrote on
Officials of the public sector bank admitted that these are initial problems of the new process and it is expected that the system will start running fully in the next one or two weeks. Overall, this new initiative of RBI will help in improving the banking system of the country.