Effective February 1, any transaction done with a Unified Payment Interface (UPI) ID containing special characters shall be declined as per the latest circular by the National Payment Corporation of India (NPCI). The new rule requires all UPI IDs to consist of strictly alphanumeric characters.
The move is aimed at standardizing and securing the UPI ecosystem. This means that users can create IDs using A-Z (uppercase), a-z (lowercase), and 0-9 (numbers). Any UPI ID containing special characters such as @, %, #, and $ will be considered non-compliant and may be blocked from performing financial transactions.