FAQs

The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) offers to banks, financial institutions, Corporates and Government/s a service termed as “National Automated Clearing House (NACH)” which includes both Debit and Credit. It shall be referred to as NACH. NACH (Debit) & NACH (Credit) aims at facilitating interbank high volume, low value debit/credit transactions, which are repetitive in nature, electronically using the NPCI service.

NACH Debit is the product of NPCI to provide a better & efficient Mandate based debit services to the banks. Following are the key features of the NACH Debit:

Automated processing and exchange of mandate information electronically with well defined timelines for acknowledgement/confirmation.

Each mandate needs to be accepted/authorized by the debtor bank before the User can initiate a transaction

Each mandate is uniquely identified by Unique Mandate Reference Number (UMRN) which makes tracking of multiple mandate details easier for customers.

MMS would allow processing of debtor and creditor initiated mandates.

MMS would allow processing of e-mandates as well as paper mandates, where emandates would consist of only data file upload while paper mandates would consist of mandate image and Data file uploads. E-mandates can be initiated only by a debtor bank.

Benefits of NACH debit are as follows:

• Standardization and digitization of mandates allowing complete audit trail of the Mandate lifecycle.
• Simplification of the mandate acceptance and recording process. Will result in reduced operational cost for the banks and its clients.
• Will result in higher revenues for the banks and its clients as the scope of services expand pan India - beyond the 90 clearing centers.

• Unique identifier number allocated to each mandate (UMRN – Unique Mandate Reference Number).
• Secure web access for file upload/download, dissuading the concept of regional NCC/Clearing House submissions.
• Mandates can be processed by the member for any branch across the country. Allows corporate clients to directly upload files for approval (DCA)
• Corporates get to have direct access to the NACH systems, making it easier for them to get access to status of transaction/mandate without delay.
• Reduction of the uploading work to the sponsor banks, since the file upload will be done by the corporates themselves

There are two methods for creation of a mandate:

• UI based: The user can log into the NPCI provided MMS utility and initiate a mandate using a user interface.
• File based: The MMS utility also gives the user the facility to upload more than once mandate through a file upload method. File format accepted will be XML only.

The Mandate Creation/Amendment/Cancellation request can be initiated by both, the Creditor Bank or the Debtor Bank.

An application-programming interface (API) is a set of programming instructions and standards for accessing a Web-based software application or Web tool that allows two applications to talk each other.

Necessary ports needs to be opened between Merchant servers, NPCI server & Merchant banks webpage. Also required certificates needs to be installed at NPCI, Merchant site & Bank site servers. Bank can refer the E-mandate authorization specification document for more details.

Corporate will develop an API in their portal or with the help of integrator which will have the facility of capturing all the mandate related information. Further merchant site re-direct the customer to bank page using NPCI interface for selection of authentication mode and for authenticating the mandate using either internet banking credentials or debit card credentials.

Below are the two types of authentication modes

• Internet banking and
• Debit card

Customer has to verify whether all the mandate details he/she going to authenticate are correct. Select the mode of authentication and authenticate the mandate duly providing his/her credentials.