Real-Time Treasury in India: What the Rails Actually Guarantee

By BillCut
Last updated: September 2026

Real-time treasury describes what businesses want rather than anything a regulator has defined. What is actually guaranteed in India is narrower and more useful. The payment rails run around the clock, credits carry deadlines, and a bank that misses one owes you money at a published rate.

This page sets out what is guaranteed, what is not, and where the gap sits.

What Does Real-Time Treasury Mean?

It means seeing and moving money continuously rather than in overnight cycles, and the two halves have very different levels of support.

Moving money is the part that is genuinely covered by rules. Seeing money across several banks is a data problem, and it has its own framework with its own limits. Treating them as one thing is where most of the confusion on this topic starts.

What you want	What supports it	How strong the support is
Send money at any hour, any day	NEFT and RTGS availability	Strong. Both are available around the clock on all days
Know when the money lands	Published credit deadlines with compensation for delay	Strong. Deadlines are stated and a miss carries a defined cost to the bank
See balances across several banks in one place	The Account Aggregator framework	Conditional. It is consent based, and the aggregator may not hold or use the data
Have the money move itself based on a rule	Nothing in the rules	None. Automation is a product feature, not an entitlement

The fourth row is worth reading twice. Sweeping idle balances, triggering payments from a threshold and forecasting shortfalls are all things software can do. None of them is guaranteed by anything, and none carries a remedy if it fails.

What Do NEFT and RTGS Guarantee Today?

Round the clock availability and a deadline for the credit, with different thresholds for each.

The Reserve Bank of India frequently asked questions on the National Electronic Funds Transfer system state that NEFT is available round the clock throughout the year on all days, on a 24x7x365 basis, and that it presently operates in half-hourly batches. They also record that banks have been advised not to levy any charges from their savings bank account holders for NEFT funds transfers initiated online, with effect from 1 January 2020.

The Reserve Bank of India frequently asked questions on Real Time Gross Settlement describe RTGS as continuous and real time settlement of fund transfers, individually on a transaction by transaction basis without netting, available 24x7x365 with effect from 14 December 2020.

Two practical readings follow. RTGS is the real time rail in the strict sense, and it has a floor of Rs 2 lakh, so it is not available for the small payments that make up most of a business day. NEFT covers everything else but settles in batches, so a NEFT instruction is fast rather than instantaneous, and the two hour figure is an outer limit rather than the usual experience.

What Are You Owed If the Money Does Not Arrive?

A reversal on a published timeline, and interest at a stated rate if the bank is late.

On NEFT, the Reserve Bank’s frequently asked questions state that if the credit cannot be provided, destination banks are required to return the transaction to the originating branch within two hours of completion of the batch in which it was processed. Where funds are neither credited nor returned within two hours of the batch settlement, the bank is liable to pay penal interest at the current Liquidity Adjustment Facility repo rate plus two per cent for the period of delay.

The figures below are illustrative. Assume a Rs 10,00,000 NEFT transfer credited three days late, at an illustrative repo rate of 5.5 per cent, so the penal rate is 7.5 per cent.

What happened	What is owed	Illustrative amount
Credited one day after the two hour window	Penal interest at the repo rate plus two per cent for the period of delay	About Rs 205
Credited three days after the two hour window	The same, for three days	About Rs 616

Those are not large sums on a single transfer, and that is the point. The compensation is designed to make delay costly for a bank across its whole book rather than to make a claimant whole. What it gives you is a rate to quote in a complaint rather than an argument about inconvenience.

A transaction that fails outright is treated separately. The Reserve Bank of India circular on harmonisation of turn around time and customer compensation for failed transactions, RBI/2019-20/67 dated 20 September 2019, sets the framework for those, including compensation of Rs 100 per day where a reversal is late.

How Do You See Cash Across Several Banks?

Through the Account Aggregator framework, which is consent based and deliberately limited.

Under the Master Direction, Non-Banking Financial Company, Account Aggregator (Reserve Bank) Directions, 2016, updated as on 6 September 2024, no financial information of the customer shall be retrieved, shared or transferred by an Account Aggregator without the explicit consent of the customer. An Account Aggregator shall not support transactions by customers, shall not use or access any customer information other than for performing the business of an account aggregator, and no financial information accessed from the financial information providers shall reside with the Account Aggregator.

The consent itself is a defined artefact. It must contain the identity of the customer and optional contact information, the nature of the financial information requested, the purpose of collecting it, the identity of the recipients, an address to which notification is to be sent, and the consent creation date, expiry date and the identity and signature of the Account Aggregator.

Three consequences matter for anyone planning around this.

• The aggregator is a pipe, not a store. It cannot keep the data, so anything persistent has to live with the recipient you nominated.
• It moves information, never money. An aggregator cannot support a transaction, so visibility and execution remain separate systems.
• Consent has an expiry date and a stated purpose. Access is not open ended and it is not general.

How the same framework works in a claims context, where the data pull is the slow step, is set out in this piece on Account Aggregator consent in insurance claims.

What About the Money Coming In?

Collections run on different rails again, and the economics changed in September 2026.

For most businesses the inbound side is dominated by person to merchant payments on UPI rather than by NEFT or RTGS. The National Payments Corporation of India frequently asked questions on the merchant discount rate on select UPI person to merchant transactions, dated 15 September 2026, set out what that now costs. A merchant discount rate of 0.4 per cent applies to person to merchant transactions above Rs 2,000, capped at Rs 300 per transaction for transactions of Rs 75,000 and above, with no impact on transactions up to Rs 2,000. Small merchants under the person to small merchant framework, described as vendors receiving up to Rs 1 lakh per month through a UPI QR code directly into their accounts, continue with zero merchant discount rate. Automated recurring standing instructions, that is mandates and autopay, do not carry a prescribed merchant discount transaction charge.

Three things follow for cash planning. The cost of collection is now a function of ticket size rather than volume, so a business taking many small payments is in a different position from one taking few large ones. Recurring collections set up as mandates are treated differently from one-off payments. And the customer pays nothing in any of these cases, so a charge passed to a payer is a commercial decision by the business rather than something the rails impose.

When that money reaches your own account is a separate question again. Under the Reserve Bank of India (Regulation of Payment Aggregators) Directions, 2025, dated 15 September 2025, a non-bank payment aggregator holds the funds collected on behalf of its merchants in a separate escrow account with a scheduled commercial bank, and funds are credited to merchants as per the agreement between the aggregator and the merchant, which should be fair, equitable and must transparently mention the settlement timelines. So the settlement date on your collections is contractual rather than fixed by a rule, and it is worth reading rather than assuming.

What Is Still Not Real Time?

More than the phrase suggests, and the gaps are predictable rather than random.

NEFT settles in half-hourly batches, so an instruction given at any moment waits for the next one. RTGS is continuous but starts at Rs 2 lakh, which excludes most day to day payments. A credit deadline of two hours or thirty minutes is an outer limit that a bank must not exceed, not a service standard it has promised to beat.

On the information side, a consent based pull is a snapshot at the moment it is taken, not a live feed, and it stops when the consent expires. And nothing in any of this touches reconciliation. Matching a credit to an invoice remains work that a business does for itself, whatever the rails underneath are doing.

The inbound side has its own gap. A payment can be instant from the customer’s side and still sit with an aggregator for a day or more before it reaches you, because that leg is governed by your settlement agreement rather than by a credit deadline. Instant acceptance and instant receipt are two different claims, and a provider is entitled to make the first without the second.

Where money is held for a condition rather than moved, the arrangement is different again and carries its own rules, which are set out in this explainer on what an escrow account is and what it protects. The differences between the account types a business might use to separate flows are covered in this comparison of wallets, cards and virtual accounts.

What Should You Check Before Relying on Any of This?

Five questions, and the answers should be in writing rather than in a sales conversation.

• Which rail does a given payment actually use, and does its amount clear the RTGS floor or fall to NEFT batches.
• What the provider commits to, as distinct from what the rail guarantees. A dashboard showing an instant update is not the same as settled money.
• Whose account the money sits in between instruction and settlement, and under what arrangement.
• Whether the data view is a consent based pull with an expiry date, and what happens to the view when that consent lapses.
• What the escalation path is when a credit is late, and whether the provider or the bank is the one you complain to.

The last one is the one most often left undefined. A platform sitting between you and a bank is not the party the payment rules bind, so establish at the outset who is answerable for a missed deadline.

Where Does a Complaint Go?

To the bank first, in writing, and then to the Ombudsman.

Raise it with the bank that held or was to credit the funds, quoting the transaction reference, the date and time of the instruction, and the deadline you say was missed. Ask for the penal interest by name rather than asking for the delay to be looked into, because the rate is published and the calculation is arithmetic.

If it is not resolved, the escalation route is the Reserve Bank Integrated Ombudsman Scheme, introduced on 12 November 2021, through the portal at cms.rbi.org.in with a contact centre on 14448.

Keep the instruction, the acknowledgement and the statement line together. A complaint that names the rail, the timestamp and the applicable deadline is a different document from one that describes a delay.

Frequently Asked Questions

This article is for information only. It is not financial, legal or treasury advice and it does not recommend any platform, bank or arrangement. Rules, thresholds, charges and rates change, and the repo rate used in the worked example is illustrative rather than a current figure, so confirm the position that applies to you with your bank or the Reserve Bank of India and take professional advice on your own arrangements.