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For businesses operating in mutual funds, broking, investment and lending, Registered bank account verification is not a design choice. It is a regulatory requirement.
SEBI mandates TPV for investment platforms and certain lending businesses like NBFC. The intent behind this is sound: regulators want certainty that money flowing into these accounts originates from a bank account that was verified and linked during the customer’s onboarding, and not from any other account the customer happens to use.
Given how exposed these sectors are to fraud and money laundering, is exactly why this requirement exists.
What TPV Actually Does
TPV restricts a customer’s UPI payment to one specific, pre-registered bank account. The flow is simple in concept:
- The merchant captures and registers the customer’s bank account during onboarding.
- The merchant passes those registered account details when creating the payment order.
- The customer is expected to select the same account in their UPI app at checkout.
If the customer selects a different account, the transaction fails, but only after PIN entry.
That sequencing, validation happening after PIN entry rather than before, is where the compliance requirement turns into a business problem.
Wrong Account Selection Problem
Most UPI apps display every linked account on the payment screen with no indication of which one is actually permitted. A customer with two or three linked accounts has no way of knowing, at a glance, which one is registered with the merchant. They tap a default account out of habit, enter their UPI PIN, and only then does the transaction fail.
For the customer, this looks like a payment failure they cannot explain.
For the merchant, it is a lost conversion at the final step of checkout, plus the resulting support burden.
This wrong-account selection currently accounts for 8% of total failures on TPV-enabled merchants.
For businesses processing high transaction volumes daily, this significantly impacts the overall success rate, driven entirely by a UI gap rather than any actual issue with the customer’s intent to pay.
Our Solution: UPI App TPV
Cashfree has partnered with Google Pay and Paytm to move TPV validation into the UPI app itself, ahead of PIN entry, rather than relying on backend validation after the fact.
This is currently a capability unique to Cashfree.
With this live:
The customer’s payment screen on Google Pay or Paytm shows only their registered account as selectable. If a customer has more than one registered account, all of them are shown as selectable.
Every other linked account is greyed out and cannot be tapped.
If the registered account is not yet linked on that app, the customer is prompted to add it before proceeding.
Because the wrong account is never selectable, the failure mode is removed at the source rather than caught and reported afterward.
Impact
In an early live deployment, this resulted in a 2% improvement in Success Rate for an enabled merchant, addressing a meaningful share of the 8% of failures caused by account selection errors.
