New Year Rings in New Rules for Financial Transactions

NEW DELHI:
The new year 2020 will usher in several new rules for financial transactions cutting across debit cards, PAN cards, withdrawal of cash from ATMs and online transfers.

From January 1, all old debit and ATM cards with a magnetic stripe will cease to work. This can be replaced with a new EMV chip debit card from the bank free of cost. According to guidelines issued by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), all banks have been asked to convert old debit cards into the new EMV-based cards.

“You need to get a new ATM card if your card is a magstripe card, as it will get blocked due to RBI directives to discontinue the operation of magstripe cards. If your card is an EMV chip card, please get in touch with your branch and ascertain that,” SBI said in a Facebook post.

EMV cards come with a small microchip that protects buyers against fraudulent transactions. It creates dynamic data every time you make a transaction which makes it impossible to clone the card. There will be a major change in SBI ATM withdrawals in late hours. For a State Bank of India (SBI) ATM card, OTP (one-time password) will be required to withdraw cash from night to morning to prevent fraud.

With effect from January 1, SBI has introduced OTP-based ATM withdrawal for transactions above Rs 10,000 between 8 pm to 8 am. However, if you are withdrawing cash from a non-SBI ATM then OTP will not be required.

On income tax return (ITR) filing, if the August 31 deadline has been missed to file an income tax return (ITR), it can be done by the end of this financial year. However, for all belated ITRs filed from January 1, a penalty of Rs 10,000 will be imposed.

In another important change, the NEFT charges for online funds transfers have been waived. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has made NEFT online transfers a 24×7 system with effect from December 16. Beginning January 1, banks have been instructed to waive off online NEFT charges for savings bank account holders. Several banks had made NEFT free already earlier.

For RuPay, UPI charges, it has been mandated that merchant discount rate (MDR) charges will not be applicable on transactions through homegrown RuPay and UPI platforms from 2020. All companies with a turnover of Rs 50 crore or more will be mandated to provide the facility of payment through RuPay Debit card and UPI QR code to their customers.