Unified Payments Interface (UPI) is an Indian instant payment system and protocol developed by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) in 2016. The interface facilitates inter-bank peer-to-peer (P2P) and person-to-merchant (P2M) transactions. It is used on mobile devices to instantly transfer funds between two bank accounts using only a unique UPI ID. My complaint is about UPI AutoPay mandates, which seem to have a fundamental flaw.

UPI AutoPay mandates basically let you set up recurring transactions to merchants. This is extremely useful for subscriptions and I have been using this feature for years. I had more than 25 AutoPay mandates with 7-8 merchants set up on Google Pay, my preferred UPI app.

Google disables my account & kills Google Pay

It all started when I changed the email address of my Google Account and some algorithm in Google’s systems found this suspicious and disabled my account.

I was able to submit an appeal and get back access to my account, but for some reason, it erased all my Google pay data. When I try registering my accounts on Google Pay now, it says this.

Basically, it has detached itself from my old Google Pay data and won’t let me continue unless my existing AutoPay mandates from (what it thinks are another account) are cancelled.

Google Pay India customer support

I contacted Google Pay India’s customer support via chat, assuming I would be able to explain the problem easily and get it fixed. Wrong!

The Level 1 chat and phone technical support couldn’t even understand the problem. They kept asking me to “go into my other google account” and delete my autopay mandates. I kept crying that there is no other account, it was the same account with a different email address, but they refused to understand.

I found a contact for Level 2 support on their website and contacted them and this was their response.

Basically, Google Pay cannot cancel mandates which I had created via Google Pay.

I escalated to Google Pay’s Nodal officer, but he didn’t even bother responding to me.

Axis Bank Customer support

All my Google Pay mandates were linked to my Axis Bank account. Surely, Axis Bank can control who takes money from my account and stop it, right? Not so!

Calls to their regular customer care went in vain. Basically, they kept instructing me on how I can cancel Axis Bank UPI mandates done via the Axis Bank app. I kept crying the mandates were via a 3rd party UPI app, but they refused to understand.

Eventually, I reached out to the Axis Bank nodal officer, and they said this.

I really don’t understand how Axis Bank cannot stop someone from taking money from my own account. Never mind, I decided to do this via National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) .

National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI)

Luckily, NPCI provides a portal where you can login and do exactly what I was trying to do.

First of all, the website doesn’t work out of India without a VPN. So much for making UPI global, yes?

With a VPN, I was elated to see all my mandates with a “Cancel” button next to them. This should be easy now, yes? Not at all.

Clicking cancel fails spectacularly. It’s not even a one time error. I tried this over many weeks with the same results.

Why even advertise a feature which doesn’t work? Either ways, it at least confirmed to me that NPCI has control over my UPI AutoPay Mandates. So next, I reached out to their customer care via email.

One email, 2 email, 3 emails, no response. They ghosted me for weeks not even bothering to respond.

One thing is clear, UPI AutoPay mandates are not well thought out, there’s no clear accountability between the bank, the app and NPCI. Never using them again!