RBI in their latest announcement has announced that cash withdrawal charges on ATM will be charged more if they surpass the monthly limit of free transactions on their debit or credit cards.The RBI, in a circular, issued earlier, said, “To compensate the banks for the higher interchange fee and given the general escalation in costs, they are allowed to increase the customer charges to Rs 21 per transaction. This increase shall be effective from January 1, 2022.”In accordance with the circular issued by RBI earlier this year, customers at ATMs will now have to pay Rs 21 per transaction, instead of Rs 20, with effect from January 1, 2022.
This amount will be charged to customers if they exceed the limit of monthly free transactions. Apart from this, customers will also be able to avail three free transactions from other bank ATMs in metro centres and five transactions in non-metro centres. RBI has also allowed central banks to raise the interchange fees per transaction from Rs 15 to Rs 17 per financial transaction and from Rs 5 to Rs 6 for non-financial transactions.These changes in the ATM withdrawal charges have come into effect as there has been an increase in the cost of ATM deployments expenses towards ATM maintenance incurred by banks/white label ATM operators. The need to balance the expectations of the stakeholders has also increased over the past few months.