What’s happening with the turmoil in recurring payments?

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Editor's note: Across the board, platforms and services in India have been cutting out or restructuring their recurring/subscription payments. For the time being, many have dropped the option to set up automatic debits on cards, both credit and debit. A quick refresher in case you haven’t been following the saga: The Reserve Bank of India had in September 2019 announced a new set of guidelines for any kind of recurring or automated digital payment. This covered everything—credit and debit cards, digital wallets, net banking, UPI. The biggest impact, though, was for card payments. Earlier, a customer could sign up for a subscription service with a credit card (and some debit cards), and subsequent monthly/quarterly/annual payments would be automatically debited without the customer having to reauthorize it with a PIN, OTP or password. RBI’s new “e-mandate” guidelines demanded that the customer needs to be notified at least a day before being charged automatically, and given an option to cancel the payment. The deadline for banks and payment processors to move to the new system was 31 March this year. What happened was that …