Think about what's tied to your current bank account. Salary credits. EMI deductions. SIP mandates. Utility bill auto-payments. Netflix, LIC, insurance premiums — all sitting quietly in the background, routing through the same account month after month.
Now imagine a competing bank offers you better interest rates, lower charges, or a genuinely superior app. Can you move? Technically yes. Practically, no — not without weeks of manually updating every single payment instruction. That friction is exactly what the Reserve Bank of India is now working to eliminate.
The RBI has placed bank account portability at the centre of its Payments Vision 2028, with plans to introduce a system that lets customers shift banks without losing their standing payment instructions. According to a Times of India report, the mechanism being developed is called the Payments Switching Service — and it could fundamentally change how Indians relate to their banks.
Savings accounts in India are what banking professionals call "sticky." Not because customers love their bank, but because leaving is genuinely painful.
Salary accounts are linked to employer payroll systems. Home loan EMIs are tied to auto-debit mandates. Insurance premiums, SIPs, credit card bill payments, subscriptions — each one is an instruction embedded in a specific account. Moving to another bank doesn't just mean opening a new account. It means tracking down every single active mandate and updating it individually, often with multiple institutions, forms, and waiting periods involved.
Most customers don't bother. And banks know this. That's the stickiness — not loyalty, just inertia born from complexity.
The RBI's proposed fix is a centralised interface — referred to as the Payments Switching Service — that would sit above individual banks and consolidate all of a customer's payment mandates in one place.
Through this interface, a customer would be able to view all their incoming and outgoing payment instructions across accounts and migrate them in bulk to a new bank. The entire process of switching, which currently takes weeks of manual coordination, could be handled through a single platform.
This is the banking equivalent of mobile number portability. When telecom regulators introduced number portability, customers could switch carriers without changing their phone number. The RBI is applying the same logic to bank accounts — your financial identity doesn't have to be locked to one institution.
RBI's Payments Vision 2028 goes well beyond account portability. It reflects a broader strategic shift — placing consumer empowerment and reduced friction at the centre of how India's payment ecosystem develops over the next few years.
The account portability initiative is one piece. Another is the push to make cross-border payments faster, cheaper, and more accessible — an area where India, like most countries, still has significant gaps. International transfers remain slow, expensive, and opaque compared to domestic UPI transactions, and the RBI has committed to a comprehensive review of the regulatory, operational, and technological bottlenecks involved.
That review is explicitly aimed at aligning India's domestic systems with global standards shaped by the G20's cross-border payments roadmap. India has already linked its fast payment infrastructure with several countries through bilateral agreements, and the Vision 2028 plan accelerates that work.
The broader framework also includes continued development of India's central bank digital currency (CBDC), with a focus on expanding its acceptance and functionality as part of the payment ecosystem rather than treating it as a separate track.
Sending money abroad from an Indian bank account is, to put it plainly, still a frustrating experience. Transactions take one to five business days. Fees can be substantial. Exchange rate transparency varies. And the compliance requirements — FEMA declarations, purpose codes, documentation — add friction that discourages even legitimate transactions.
The RBI's cross-border review under Payments Vision 2028 acknowledges this directly. The plan isn't to bypass regulatory requirements — those exist for legitimate reasons — but to remove unnecessary operational friction and modernise the infrastructure that currently slows things down.
UPI's international expansion is part of this. Its linkage with Singapore's PayNow, the UAE's payment network, and several other systems has already shown what's possible when domestic fast payment rails are extended across borders. Vision 2028 looks to widen and deepen those connections.
Practically speaking, nothing changes today. The Payments Vision 2028 is a framework — a direction the RBI has set — not a product that's live.
Honestly, a firm timeline for when the Payments Switching Service will be available to consumers hasn't been confirmed yet. The RBI has signalled intent, but the actual rollout will depend on regulatory groundwork, bank system integration, and the kind of testing that takes time.
What's worth noting is that the problem being targeted is real. Millions of Indian bank customers are effectively locked into accounts they'd move away from if switching weren't so cumbersome. The RBI has named that problem explicitly — that's not nothing. Regulatory acknowledgement of a friction point is usually the first step before anything actually gets built.
Right now, there's no easy way — and that's precisely the problem the RBI is trying to address. Currently, switching your primary bank account means manually contacting each institution that holds an auto-debit mandate against your account: your employer for salary, your lender for EMI, your insurer, your mutual fund platform, and so on. Each has its own process and timeline. The proposed Payments Switching Service would centralise all of this into a single interface, letting you migrate mandates in bulk. Until that system is live, the most practical approach is to maintain your old account active during a transition period while gradually shifting mandates to the new one — typically over two to three months.
The Payments Switching Service is a centralised platform the RBI intends to build as part of its Payments Vision 2028 plan. It would allow bank customers to view all active payment mandates — incoming and outgoing — and transfer them to a different bank without manual intervention at each institution. No official launch date has been announced. The RBI has committed to a review of the regulatory and technological requirements, but implementation timelines for infrastructure of this scale in India typically run two to four years from policy announcement to consumer availability. Keep an eye on RBI circulars and annual payment system reports for concrete updates.
Salary accounts are particularly sticky because the link isn't just between you and your bank — it's between your employer's payroll system and your bank. Your employer's HR or finance team has to initiate a change at their end, which involves internal approvals and sometimes technical integrations. On top of that, any linked mandates — credit card autopay, loan EMIs, SIPs — each require separate updates with separate institutions. The RBI has explicitly called this "stickiness" a problem worth solving. The Payments Switching Service is specifically designed to decouple your payment identity from any single bank, though it won't necessarily change the employer-side payroll link on its own.
The analogy is useful but not perfect. Mobile number portability lets you keep the same number while switching carriers — a clean, single identifier that follows you. Bank account portability is more complex because there are many more attached instructions: dozens of payment mandates tied to dozens of institutions, each with their own systems. The RBI's approach isn't to give you a portable account number (at least not as currently described) — it's to make it easy to migrate all your standing instructions to a new account number at a different bank. The outcome is similar: you can switch without losing your financial continuity. The mechanics underneath are different. Practical tip: think of it less like number portability and more like forwarding all your mail when you move house — same result, different process.
Based on what's been announced, the RBI's plan doesn't involve transferring your existing account number to a new bank. Account numbers are bank-specific identifiers, and changing that would require a much deeper restructuring of banking infrastructure. What the Payments Switching Service would allow is migrating your payment mandates — the instructions to send and receive money — to a new account at a different bank. Your old account number stays with your old bank, but your financial life moves with you. The distinction matters practically: anyone who has your current account number saved for transfers (family, clients, employers) would need to be updated with your new details.
The account portability proposal sits inside something larger. India spent the last decade building payment infrastructure — UPI, IMPS, NACH, FASTag, now CBDC — and those systems have genuinely transformed how money moves domestically.
What Vision 2028 signals is that the next phase isn't just about adding new rails. It's about reducing the friction that still exists for users navigating those rails — switching banks, sending money abroad, managing multiple mandates across institutions, understanding what's happening to their money in real time.
The RBI is essentially asking: now that we've built this, are customers actually free to use it on their own terms? Account portability is one answer to that question. The cross-border payments review is another. The CBDC expansion is a third.
None of it arrives overnight. But the direction is clear — and for most Indian bank customers, it's a direction worth watching
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