Payment Gateway Questions & Answers

Your ERP finance module can surface real-time messages about higher UPI payment limits for travel bookings by combining live payment gateway data with customer and transaction context. Since travel bookings often exceed standard UPI caps (₹1 lakh), showing these messages at the right moment helps prevent failed checkouts and improves conversion rates especially for high-value itineraries.

The first step is to integrate your ERP’s payment layer with the UPI PSP’s limit eligibility API (if available). This API can tell you whether a customer’s bank supports higher UPI limits for specific merchant categories like travel.

For example, if a user is booking a ₹1.5 lakh international flight, your system can check their bank’s UPI configuration in real time. If it returns a flag indicating High-value travel transaction eligible, your ERP can instantly display a banner saying something like:

Good news! Your bank supports higher UPI limits for travel bookings. You can complete this payment directly via UPI.

If the customer’s bank doesn’t allow it, your ERP can show a helpful fallback message such as:

Your bank’s UPI limit is ₹1 lakh per transaction. Try splitting the payment or using net banking for faster checkout.

To make this work, the ERP needs to maintain a bank-wise UPI limit matrix.

This is basically a lookup table (updated daily or weekly via PSP or NPCI data feeds) that lists UPI transaction caps for each bank and category like travel, education, or insurance. During checkout, the ERP compares the booking amount and bank details against this matrix and dynamically shows an eligibility message before the user confirms payment.

You can also use context-based messaging tied to user profiles. For instance, if a repeat corporate traveler often books high-value tickets, the ERP could proactively display a note like:

You’ve made large UPI payments with XYZ Bank before, your current booking qualifies for higher transaction limits.

On the UI side, the ERP should surface these messages right before payment confirmation (on the review screen) or after a failed attempt (suggesting eligible alternatives). To keep the experience seamless, use the same payment gateway APIs that handle retries or bank routing, so the system doesn’t need extra user input.

Finance teams should enable alerts for daily UPI volume, high-value transactions, failure spikes, bank-wise caps, and settlement mismatches. Together, these give a clear, real-time picture of UPI usage for education fee payments and help teams act before payment issues turn into revenue disruptions.

Start by creating a daily aggregate usage alert. This should track the total UPI inflow amount across all education-related invoices within a 24-hour period. For example, if your school or platform typically collects ₹30 lakh a day, set a soft threshold alert at around 80% of that figure. When that limit is reached, your finance team gets a notification saying, UPI collections have reached 80% of today’s threshold, monitor closely for cap breaches. This helps avoid bottlenecks or failed transactions if traffic spikes suddenly.

Next, configure an alert for high-value transactions. If any single UPI payment exceeds ₹1 lakh, flag it for quick verification, especially if your payment gateway hasn’t yet enabled the ₹5L limit across all banks. The tool should record the payer’s bank, UPI ID, and reference number in the alert, so the team can confirm it’s processed correctly and not stuck in pending settlement.

You should also add an alert for failed or pending UPI settlements. For instance, if a large payment stays in pending status for more than T+1 day, the system should notify finance automatically. This helps track when banks or PSPs are lagging in clearing high-value education transactions.

Another useful one is a bank-level cap utilization alert, basically, track how much UPI volume each partner bank or PSP is handling daily. If a particular bank hits a temporary cap or slows down, your team can proactively route large payments through alternative gateways.

Finally, generate a daily summary report alert at the end of the day. It should list total UPI volume, number of transactions, average transaction size, and how many hit the new high-limit category. Automating this report keeps finance, compliance, and audit teams aligned without manual data pulls.

Your finance team should enable alerts for:

• Daily UPI volume nearing limit
• High-value transaction spikes
• Sudden failure rate increases
• Bank-wise usage trends
• Settlement mismatches
• PSP latency or delay indicators

These alerts give your team real-time visibility into UPI performance for travel bookings, helping them prevent payment disruptions, manage liquidity, and keep settlements smooth.

If your billing engine is handling education fee payments via UPI, you’ll want to start tagging every incoming payment with the right purpose code, that’s what auditors and regulators use to classify UPI inflows. For education-related transactions, NPCI recommends codes like EDU_FEES, EDU_TUITION, or EDU_SERVICE, depending on the type of institution and fee structure.

Here’s the trick: your subscription engine needs to push this purpose code at the payment creation stage, not after settlement. When you create the UPI intent or collect request through your PSP (like Razorpay, Juspay, or Cashfree), most APIs have a field like purpose_code or txn_note. Populate that dynamically based on the invoice or subscription type.

For example:

• If it’s a school or college fee, use EDU_FEES.
• If it’s an online learning platform (subscription-based), use EDU_SERVICE.
• If it’s a mixed-category business (like education + test prep), derive the code from the GL (general ledger) mapping in your billing system.

Store this purpose code in your own transaction table or metadata field too. That way, when you generate audit reports or GST e-invoices later, you can show a clean mapping:

UPI Ref ID → Purpose Code → Ledger → Tax Invoice

It makes reconciliation smoother because auditors can trace every UPI receipt to its declared purpose without digging into line-item descriptions.

You can also automate a validation layer: before pushing any UPI transaction, check if the merchant category (MCC) matches the allowed purpose code set. For instance, a merchant tagged as Education shouldn’t be sending UPI requests with a generic OTHERS purpose, it’s a compliance red flag.

Finally, have your finance team export a daily summary by purpose code, total UPI inflows per code, matched against your ledger entries. It’ll make quarterly audits and GST filings much easier, especially now that higher UPI limits apply specifically to education transactions.

Enable alerts for:

• Daily total UPI volume
• Per-VPA usage
• High-value payments
• Failure spikes
• Pending settlements
• Split payments
• PSP latency

That gives finance and ops a real-time view of UPI health before caps, delays, or mismatches start breaking checkouts.

Ah, the classic UPI retry storm problem, one FD payment lags, and suddenly your system hammers the PSP 50 times like it owes you rent.

If your reconciliation engine is involved in posting or retrying UPI payments for term deposits, you’ve got to rate-limit and back off intelligently when response times get ugly.

Here’s how to handle it cleanly:

• Watch latency in real time

Your reconciliation service should be monitoring average UPI API response times from PSPs or payment gateways.

Once it crosses a threshold (say, >2 seconds for collect requests or >5 seconds for status checks), mark the PSP as degraded.

You can track this using a rolling 5-minute window:
if avg_response_time > 2s for last 20 calls:

 PSP_status = DEGRADED

• Switch to exponential backoff

Instead of retrying instantly, back off exponentially when in degraded mode.

Never let reconciliation keep hammering NPCI endpoints or gateway APIs — you’ll just make the latency worse.

• Use a per-category throttle for FDs

Term deposit openings are high-value and not time-sensitive like bill payments.

Throttle them harder — e.g. 2–3 retries max over 15 minutes.

Meanwhile, keep low-value UPI collections (like ₹100 bills) on a faster retry policy.

That means your logic should check something like:

if txn.category == TERM_DEPOSIT:

set_retry_policy(slow)

else:

set_retry_policy(normal)

• Pause retries globally if latency spikes across PSPs

If all your PSPs (Razorpay, Cashfree, PayU, etc.) are lagging at once, it’s probably an NPCI or bank switch issue.

In that case, trigger a global cooldown, stop retries for 5–10 minutes and show users a soft message like:

UPI networks are slower right now. Your FD payment will be retried automatically once things stabilize.

• Alert finance + ops teams

When throttling kicks in, send a Slack/email alert to finance or ops:

• UPI retries throttled for FD transactions
• Include metrics like current latency, pending transaction count, and next retry time.

That keeps everyone informed without manual digging.

• Resume normal retries automatically

When your average response time drops back below the threshold (say, <1.5s for 3 consecutive minutes),

mark the PSP as healthy again and restore normal retry intervals.

So after the 2025 UPI update, education fee payments and term deposits were moved into the high-value, permitted category, meaning NPCI and banks can now allow higher per-transaction limits (₹2L–₹5L) if the payment is tagged correctly.

If your billing system supports UPI for schools or universities, you can show real-time messages when the customer’s bank supports those higher limits.

Here’s how to wire that up:

• Detect the transaction category early

When the invoice or payment link is created, tag it as:

upi_category: EDUCATION_FEES

That category code is how NPCI and PSPs decide whether the higher limit applies.

If the backend already knows the payment is education fees, pass that in the UPI intent or collect payload.

• Query PSP / Bank capability in real time

Before showing the payment screen, ping your PSP or UPI SDK (

Razorpay, Cashfree, PayU, etc.) for the payer’s bank + PSP profile.

They usually return metadata like:

{ 

bank: HDFC Bank,

upi_limit: 500000,

category_supported: [EDUCATION_FEES, TERM_DEPOSIT]

}

If the category and limit match your transaction, boom eligible.

• Surface the message on the payment screen

When you detect eligibility, show a non-intrusive banner or toast right under the UPI option:

Good news!

Payments for education fees are eligible for higher UPI limits (up to ₹5,00,000) with your bank.

If the user isn’t eligible:

Your bank’s UPI limit is ₹1,00,000 per transaction. Try NetBanking or split your payment.

No one wants to hit Pay and watch it fail after 5 seconds.

• Cache the limit per bank / PSP

You don’t need to query NPCI every time.

Cache UPI limits per bank + category for a few hours.

• Show fallback recommendations

If the user’s limit is low, suggest next best options right on-screen:

You’ve hit your ₹1L UPI cap. Try splitting into smaller UPI transfers or use NetBanking.

Keeps checkout smooth without confusion.

• Optional: Add a soft eligibility check before QR render

If you’re using intent flow or dynamic QR, validate eligibility before generating the QR.

That saves unnecessary QR refreshes or collect failures.

According to the latest UPI update on September 15, 2025, the limits will vary by category, allowing for some categories to have higher limits for fee payments than standard peer-to-peer or retail payments. For example, for verified education or hospital merchants, there could be a limit of ₹5 lakh per transaction for payment. If your payment gateway processes fee payments for education, you’ll need to review and confirm that your per transaction and daily cumulative limits are compliant each time you run a transaction.

To accommodate this, you will need to have a configuration table in your backend that holds the UPI limits for each merchant category. For example, an EDU_FEES category could hold a limit of ₹5,00,000 per transaction and daily, or it could show a limit of ₹1,00,000 for standard retail payments.

Whenever you make a payment request, your code will need to set the category code on each one, or simply payment.category = EDU_FEES. This ensures that all validation and reporting downstream use the correct ruleset.

Before initiating the UPI, intent or collect call, check if the payment amount exceeds the category’s configured cap. If it does, the system should automatically block the transaction and prompt the user to either split the payment or choose another method like NetBanking. Similarly, your gateway should track the total UPI inflows for that category throughout the day. If the cumulative amount for all education fee payments crosses the daily aggregate cap, the integration should prevent new payments from being initiated until the next settlement cycle.

The user experience also matters here. If a transaction is blocked because of the new UPI cap, your front-end should show a clear message such as: This payment exceeds the UPI limit for education fee transactions. Please split your payment or use an alternate method. Ideally, you can even automate the split process, e.g., breaking a ₹6 lakh fee into two UPI requests of ₹3 lakh each, so the user doesn’t have to start over manually.

Finally, after every successful payment, make sure you store the category code, UPI reference ID (RRN), amount, and merchant VPA in your logs. This makes audits and reconciliation far easier when regulators or your finance team want to verify compliance with category-wise UPI limits.

If your billing platform handles education fee collections through UPI, you can use the new NPCI rule (post–Sept 2025) that allows verified education merchants to accept up to ₹5 lakh per UPI transaction. The key is to make your checkout aware of merchant category codes (MCCs) and bank-side limit eligibility in real time, so you can tell the customer before their payment fails.

Start by tagging every UPI payment request with its merchant category, e.g. EDU_FEES. When the billing engine generates a UPI intent or collects request, your payment gateway (like Razorpay, Cashfree, or PayU) usually returns metadata that includes whether the merchant and payer’s bank combination supports the higher cap. That’s your trigger to surface a contextual message.

If the payer’s bank doesn’t support it, you can show a fallback message like:

Your bank allows up to ₹1 lakh per UPI payment. For larger fees, you can split the payment or use NetBanking.

Don’t overcomplicate it with pop-ups, just place this message near the payment amount field or confirmation button so it feels helpful and not intrusive.

Under the hood, cache the bank + PSP eligibility matrix in your billing engine’s metadata service. That way, you’re not calling live APIs for every customer, you just refresh the matrix every few hours. Some PSPs even expose this via webhook updates, so your engine stays synced without extra polling.

Finally, log whenever a customer sees the eligible for higher limit message versus when they see the split required one. That gives your product and finance teams data to optimize checkout UX or identify banks still enforcing the old ₹1 lakh cap.