RBI to set up 'Digital Payments Intelligence Platform' to minimise fraud

Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Governor Shaktikanta Das, while briefing the press following the three-day policy review meeting called by the central bank's Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) committee, said a new platform would set up to combat online fraud.

The RBI will establish the "Digital Payments Intelligence Platform" to minimise the cases of online financial crimes, Das said on Friday.

To take this initiative forward, the bank has constituted a committee under National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) former CEO A P Hota for the "setting up a digital public infrastructure for Digital Payments Intelligence Platform", he added.

The Hota-led panel is expected to give its recommendations within two months.

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'Mitigating payment fraud'

While RBI did not share the exact details related to the platform, the statement issued by Das provided some insight into how it will work. The platform "will harness advanced technologies to mitigate payment fraud risks", he said.

Das pointed out that the Reserve Bank, over the past several years, has undertaken a number of measures for the safety and security of digital payments to maintain public confidence in digital payment systems.

"Sustaining such confidence would require minimising incidence of frauds. Many frauds occur by influencing unsuspecting victims to make the payment or share credentials. While the payment ecosystem (banks, NPCI, card networks, payment aggregators, and payment apps) take various measures on an ongoing basis to protect customers from such frauds, there is a need for network-level intelligence and real-time data sharing across payment systems," he added.

According to the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C), an official body under the Union home ministry, Indian cumulatively lost Rs 1,750 crore due to cyber fraud in the first four months of 2024. According to the platform, an average of 7,000 complaints of online financial fraud were recorded per day in May 2024, which is 60% higher than the total complaints registered in fiscal year 2023-24.