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Despite the rise of newer payment methods like UPI, net banking still remains the preferred choice for many of India’s highest-value digital transactions.
For larger amounts, users still prefer the familiarity and perceived security of their bank’s own ecosystem. In the first half of 2025 alone, net banking processed over ₹717 trillion (approximately $8.5 trillion) in transaction value.
However, net banking has a problem that is very evident: Its Infrastructure.
Today, the system operates as a mesh of bilateral integrations – banks maintain separate integration with every payment aggregator, with each connection demanding significant engineering bandwidth .The complexity runs both ways: PAs face the burden with managing dispute, settlement, and reconciliation processes individually for every bank they are integrated with.
The result is a system where both sides are investing significant bandwidth just to keep integrations alive – leaving little room to focus on reliability, speed, or customer experience at scale.
Banking Connect, introduced by NBBL, aims to modernise this infrastructure through a single interoperable framework where banks and payment aggregators each connect once, and the standardisation of settlement, disputes, and reconciliation is handled at the network layer.
What Changes with Banking Connect
Instead of the bank integrating separately with every payment aggregator, Banking Connect introduces a unified network where banks and aggregators connect once to NBBL.
Transactions move through a standardised platform that simplifies integrations, reduces operational fragmentation, and creates a more consistent payment experience across the ecosystem.
The new flows let customers open their bank app, authenticate with biometrics, PIN or OTP, and complete the payment in seconds. (add image)
There is a QR-based path for web journeys too. The multi-step redirection experience that has frustrated customers for years gets replaced with something that actually belongs in 2026.
The Hidden Complexity for Banks
Joining Banking Connect means deploying an issuing switch: the layer that connects the bank’s core banking system to NBBL and manages every transaction from authorisation to reconciliation. Banks that have attempted to build this internally know what it actually costs.
The NBBL certification process is not a formality. It requires deep working knowledge of the IBMB specification, and the spec is not static. Beyond certification, the switch has to handle API flows, manage response timeouts, and trigger automatic debit reversals on failures. But the deeper challenge is ongoing: the IBMB specification evolves, and every change NPCI makes to the framework has to be absorbed, tested, and deployed. For banks, this means the maintenance burden does not end at go-live. It compounds over time.
For many banks, especially smaller and mid-sized institutions, building this infrastructure internally can be resource-intensive.
Engineering bandwidth increase. Timelines slip. And once the switch is live, the banks have to own it indefinitely.
A TSP takes all of that off the bank’s plate. Depending on the deployment model, the switch can be hosted on cloud infrastructure managed by the TSP, or within the bank’s own environment , with data control and compliance staying with the bank. The technical ownership, from day one through every future upgrade is with the TSP.
Where Cashfree Fits
Cashfree has already completed NBBL’s certification for Banking Connect and operates its own acquiring switch on the platform.
Having already gone through the certification process and implementation lifecycle, Cashfree brings practical experience across the technical and operational nuances of the framework. That end-to-end understanding becomes especially valuable when diagnosing transaction failures or asynchronous flow issues, where visibility across the entire payment lifecycle matters.
Cashfree has spent over a decade building payment infrastructure across different pay modes, and brings that technical and operational depth directly to the Banking Connect implementation.
Beyond Just the Switch
Beyond deploying and operating the issuing switch, Cashfree provides an operational layer that gives banks greater visibility and control across their Banking Connect flows.
The IBMB portal helps banks manage operational workflows such as dispute handling, bulk dispute uploads, settlement file downloads, and escalation management across participant banks. It acts as the operational backbone for managing reconciliations, arbitration flows, and inter-bank coordination within the Banking Connect ecosystem.
Cashfree Operational Portal
Alongside the IBMB layer, Cashfree provides an operational dashboard designed for monitoring, reconciliation, and day-to-day transaction management.
- Dashboard and monitoring: Real-time visibility into success rates, transaction status, GMV by payment aggregator, and failure trends.
- Transaction search: Search transactions by status, payment aggregator, channel, or date with detailed API-level timelines.
- Merchant onboarding workflows: Approve or reject merchant onboarding requests directly from the portal.
- Reconciliation management: Upload IBMB and bank debit files, run reconciliations, and review mismatches from a single interface.
- Configuration controls: Enable or disable channels, set transaction limits, and manage MCC-level controls centrally.
- Performance monitoring and alerts: Monitor API uptime, IBMB connectivity, latency, and operational alerts in real time.
The Early-Mover Advantage
Banking Connect is live. NBBL is onboarding banks. The early movers will be the ones who define what modern net banking looks like in India, and the ones who wait will find themselves catching up.
The question is not whether to join. It is whether to spend the next year building the infrastructure yourself, or to go live with a TSP that has already done it.
