The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) is set to make UPI AutoPay interoperable, allowing users to port mandates across UPI apps, and merchants to move existing mandates from one payment gateway to another, four people aware of the development said.
The move could reduce two forms of lock-in in the recurring-payments market. Consumers will be able to shift existing AutoPay mandates to another UPI app instead of cancelling and recreating subscriptions, insurance premiums, systematic investment plans (SIPs) or loan repayments, while merchants will be able to move existing mandates to another payment provider when they switch gateways.
For users, a cross-app view of mandates could also make it easier to track upcoming debits, account balances and forgotten subscriptions.
Both features are expected to be announced at the Global Fest in Mumbai next month, one of the people said.
Importantly, mandates linked to different customer bank accounts will continue to be debited from the account originally authorised by the user. The interoperability change instead allows eligible mandates to be accessed across UPI apps, while merchants can shift execution to a new acquiring bank or payment gateway without requiring customers to register afresh.
NPCI launchedAutoPay in 2020 to let businesses automatically debit a customer’s bank account at fixed intervals for subscriptions, loan repayments, insurance premiums and mutual fund investments.
NPCI and payment gateways have been working on interoperability to allow merchants to port mandates between acquiring partners for some time, the people cited above said.
The scale of recurring payments has also grown sharply. Data from the showed that the top 10 banks cumulatively processed nearly 1.8 billion UPI e-mandate transactions in July, more than three times the 585 million handled in July 2025.
Levelling the field
The interoperability push has been driven partly by smaller UPI apps, which see AutoPay as a tool that keeps customers captive to larger rivals, a payments industry executive at a large UPI app said on condition of anonymity.
“The smaller apps wanted what they call a level playing field. They feel AutoPay is one way in which people become captive to an app,” the executive said. “Generally, an AutoPay customer will be more sticky, because if you’ve set it up, there is always that fatigue of moving apps. So the smaller apps felt that it makes the consumer captive.”
Many users install a UPI app for cashbacks and offers, set up an AutoPay mandate and then have little reason to change apps because their recurring payments are linked to the platform. If mandates can be viewed and ported across apps, that advantage could weaken, giving newer apps such as Navi, POP UPI and super.money a better chance of attracting users whose recurring payments are currently managed through larger UPI apps like PhonePe or Google Pay.
The change, however, requires work across the ecosystem. “All the apps also have to make changes to enable this, because it has to be across apps,” the executive said, adding that his own company had made those changes.
Queries emailed to NPCI on Wednesday didn’t elicit a response till press time.
What merchants get
For merchants, interoperability means their existing base of mandates becomes portable. Currently, a subscription business that switches payment gateways can route new customers through the new partner, but its older mandates remain with the original provider.
“If I were Netflix and initially went live with another payment gateway, such as PayU, I may later want to move both new and existing mandates to Cashfree. Under interoperability, Cashfree would then be able to execute debits on those existing mandates going forward,” said Reeju Dutta, co-founder of payment aggregator Cashfree Payments.
“Without interoperability, a merchant can move new customers to a new gateway, but the mandates of existing customers remain with the original provider. That leaves the merchant tied to the earlier gateway for its legacy mandate base, which is the problem interoperability is designed to solve,” Dutta added.
A heavy lift
“Earlier, UPI apps operated through proprietary QR codes. A Paytm user, for instance, could make a payment through the Paytm app only by scanning a QR code issued by Paytm, rather than a QR code from another payment app,” said a senior executive of a large payment gateway provider requesting anonymity.
The same interoperability is now being enabled for UPI AutoPay as well. “The objective is to move away from a closed-loop system and create a many-to-many network that is agnostic to the consumer app being used. Users should be able to set up UPI AutoPay services regardless of where the biller is onboarded,” the executive said.
Building this interoperability will require changes by consumer-facing apps rather than payment processors. “This is a heavy lift on the TPAP (third-party application provider) side, on the consumer app side, because that’s where you’re trying to create the interoperability by saying nobody should have a proprietary AutoPay product,” the executive added.
UPI processed a record 23.66 billion transactions worth ₹29.88 trillion in July, according to NPCI data. PhonePe led with 45.89% of transaction volumes, followed by Google Pay at 32.33% and Paytm at 8.05%, leaving the smaller apps that lobbied for a level playing field to fight over the rest.