PAID ATM TRANSACTION FEE IN INDIA ?? NOT ANYMORE

1st Of April, better known as Fool's Day world over, has brought about a great gift for all Indians, using bank ATMs. While ATMs have been great invention enabling people to deposit and withdraw cash from bank accounts without going to the bank,but one could do this only from that particular bank's ATM or else ended up paying up transaction fee which was Rs20-Rs30 per transaction from non bank ATM. Even for checking your account balance you had to pay some money as fee , if done from a non bank ATM.

However, all this has changed from 1st April 2009. From today onwards, the transaction fee, in India , levied by banks on transactions carried on a non bank or non member banks (in some cases few banks had formed associations where they waived off this fee. for example , Kotak bank had tie ups with lot of banks where the kotak bank user wasn't charged any money) has been waived off completely thanks to RBI directive in this regard.

Now one can use any banks ATM without bothering about the transaction fee in India. This is beneficial for both banks and consumers. While for consumers, the obvious benefit is of convenience of using the nearest ATM irrespective of it being of any bank's ATM, for banks it offers a great opportunity to leverage the ATM networks of other banks to service their own customers. For relatively smaller banks who till now didn't have a large ATM networks can now extend this service to all their customers and as such it offers them a great level playing field.

So, the larger picture is that this is a great move by RBI in the direction of making banking an easier , affordable and convenient experience for all the Indians.