Banks, based on their risk assessment and provided FEMA standards are adhered to, can implement a simple process for crediting incoming payments to the account of individual residents | Photo credit: Bloomberg
The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) on Wednesday introduced draft guidelines to improve the speed of cross-border payments, including asking banks to inform their customers about the receipt of cross-border incoming transactions immediately after receiving an incoming message.
The RBI said that messages received from the individual banks after the closing hours will be communicated to the customer immediately at the beginning of the next business day. It was noted that several banks depend on end-of-day nostro account statements for confirming and reconciling receipts to nostro accounts, resulting in delayed lending. To expedite this process, the RBI asked banks to undertake reconciliation and confirmation of credit to the nostro account either on a near real-time basis or at periodic intervals. The tuning interval should normally not exceed thirty minutes.
“Banks will endeavor to credit incoming payments received during foreign exchange market hours to the beneficiary’s account within the same business day, and to credit incoming payments received after market hours on the next business day, subject to compliance with existing FEMA and other regulatory requirements.,” the guidelines said.
Banks, based on their risk assessment and provided FEMA standards are adhered to, can implement a simple process for crediting incoming payments to the account of individual residents. Further, lenders may, within a reasonable timeframe, seek to provide their customers with a digital interface to facilitate currency transactions, including the submission of documents or information, and monitoring of transactions.
The RBI has sought public feedback on the guidelines by November 19 and the guidelines will come into effect after six months.
Published on October 29, 2025
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