India has proposed a one-hour delay on certain UPI payments as fraud cases rise tenfold since 2021. But is slowing down one of the world’s most celebrated instant payment networks a pragmatic fix – or an admission that real-time fraud prevention has hit a ceiling?
India wants to put a deliberate pause into UPI, one of the world’s most advanced instant payment networks. The Payment Expert Podcast team asks whether the payments industry has been building speed before safety.
News Editor Louis Thompsett is joined by Senior Journalists Callum Williams and Kieran O’Connor to examine the Reserve Bank of India‘s (RBI) proposal and what it means for the broader instant payments landscape.
The RBI’s plan applies a provisional debit with a one-hour cancellation window to authorised push payments above roughly $107, giving payers time to reverse anything suspicious.
The episode weighs this against Brazil’s Pix model, which keeps payments instant but routes disputes through an in-app flagging mechanism with a central bank review window of up to seven days.
Both approaches try to solve the same problem – but the fraud profiles driving them are quite different. India faces a heavy APP fraud burden, driven by social engineering and AI-assisted impersonation. Brazil’s challenge is more volume-based and opportunistic.
Where fraud responsibility sits and how different markets react
The conversation also covers where responsibility for fraud actually sits. Social media platforms are where most APP scams originate, but payments companies are left building the defences while that broader conversation stalls.
On European readiness, the team notes that while the EU‘s instant payments mandate includes penalties for PSPs which miss ten-second transaction processing targets, there is no equivalent penalty for weak fraud controls The incentive structure rewards speed over safety.
Episode five of the Payment Expert Podcast is available now on Spotify, YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and all major podcast platforms. To make sure you don’t miss an episode, subscribe to the Payment Expert newsletter.
