The National Payments Corporation of India completed its phased elimination of the UPI Collect request feature on February 28, 2026, marking one of the most significant functional changes to the Unified Payments Interface since its launch a decade ago. The move targeted the payment mechanism responsible for an estimated seventy percent of UPI-related fraud cases, replacing it with safer alternatives that keep payment initiation firmly in the hands of the payer.
UPI Collect was a pull payment feature that allowed one party to send a payment request to another user's UPI app, prompting them to approve or decline the transaction. While the mechanism served legitimate billing scenarios, fraudsters exploited it extensively by sending fake collect requests impersonating banks, government agencies, or merchants, tricking users into approving unauthorized payments. The simplicity of the attack vector, requiring only a target's UPI ID or mobile number, made collect-based fraud the single largest category of UPI-related financial crime.
NPCI executed the deprecation in two phases. The first phase, effective October 1, 2025, eliminated person-to-person collect requests entirely. Under this change, all P2P payments on UPI became push-only, meaning only the payer can initiate a transaction. The second and final phase took effect on February 28, 2026, when NPCI directed payment aggregators and merchants to discontinue the UPI Collect flow for person-to-merchant transactions. Merchants were required to migrate to UPI Intent, where the customer selects a payment app icon on mobile, or UPI QR codes for desktop-initiated payments.
Several exemptions remain in place to accommodate use cases where pull-based flows are technically necessary. Stock market and IPO-related transactions, where investors must enter their UPI ID for mandate creation under SEBI requirements, continue to support the collect flow. Apple and iOS users, whose platform limitations restrict intent-based payment flows, retain access to collect-based payments. UPI Autopay mandates for recurring subscriptions and EMI payments are also unaffected, as are certain international transaction categories where intent-based flows are not yet supported across jurisdictions.
Payment aggregators including Cashfree, Razorpay, and others updated their integration documentation ahead of the February 28 deadline, guiding merchants toward Intent and QR-based payment flows. The transition has been operationally smooth given that the majority of UPI transactions already used these mechanisms before the formal deprecation. Industry participants have noted that the change reinforces NPCI's strategy of systematically reducing fraud attack surfaces within the UPI ecosystem while preserving its core functionality and ease of use.
The deprecation comes as UPI processes over twenty billion transactions monthly and accounts for roughly half of all global real-time payments by volume. With the collect flow eliminated as a major fraud vector, NPCI and the Reserve Bank of India have simultaneously introduced complementary consumer protection measures, including a proposed digital fraud compensation framework with payouts of up to twenty-five thousand rupees for eligible small-value fraud cases reported within five days.