UPI AutoPay mandates may become portable: report
If a customer moves their recurring mandate from one UPI app to another without cancelling it, a churn event you never caused disappears from your subscription numbers. That is what is being reported, not announced.
- Entrackr, citing a Mint report, says NPCI is preparing to let users move eligible UPI AutoPay mandates between apps without cancelling and recreating them.
- The transfer would be initiated by the user and authenticated through the UPI PIN, covering OTT subscriptions, insurance premiums, SIPs, EMIs and utility bills.
- No launch date is given and the criteria that make a mandate eligible are not specified; the change is expected to be highlighted at the upcoming Global Fintech Fest.
- Top 10 banks processed nearly 1.8 billion UPI e-mandate transactions in July 2026, more than three times the 585 million recorded in July 2025.
Entrackr, citing a Mint report, says NPCI is preparing to make UPI AutoPay mandates portable across apps. That sourcing matters: this is a report of what is being prepared, not an announcement from NPCI, and nothing has launched.
The mechanic as described is that users would be able to move eligible UPI AutoPay mandates from one UPI app to another without cancelling and recreating them. The transfer would be initiated by the user and would require authentication through the UPI PIN. The example given is a user with an existing AutoPay mandate on PhonePe moving it to Google Pay or another UPI app, subject to the mandate being eligible. PhonePe, Google Pay and Paytm are named as leading UPI platforms.
The word doing the most work there is eligible, and the eligibility criteria are not specified in the report. Neither is a launch date. The only timing signal given is that the change is expected to be highlighted at the upcoming Global Fintech Fest. There are no quotes from named officials.
The categories named are the standing-instruction ones: OTT subscriptions, insurance premiums, SIPs, EMIs and utility bills. On scale, the top 10 banks processed nearly 1.8 billion UPI e-mandate transactions in July 2026, more than three times the 585 million recorded in July 2025.
For a D2C brand selling on subscription, the mandate is the relationship. Today, a customer who switches UPI apps has to cancel the mandate and set it up again, which means you have to win an authorisation a second time for a reason that has nothing to do with your product, your pricing or your service. In your numbers that lands as churn you did not cause and cannot retention-market your way out of. Portability, in the form described, removes that failure mode entirely.
Until it exists, the work is unchanged and worth doing anyway. Know what share of your active mandates sits on each UPI app, so you can size the exposure. Track mandate failures separately from payment failures, because they have different causes and different fixes. Keep a re-authorisation flow that fires within hours of a mandate dropping rather than waiting for the next billing cycle to discover it. If portability does ship, that instrumentation is what tells you whether it moved your involuntary churn at all.
Zane’s analysis draws on original reporting by Entrackr. Read the original report.