NEFT settlement
NEFTThe settlement cycle of India's National Electronic Funds Transfer system, in which transfers are batched and settled in half-hourly windows operated by the Reserve Bank of India around the clock.
National Electronic Funds Transfer (NEFT) is India's deferred-net-settlement retail payment system, operated by the Reserve Bank of India. Since December 2019 NEFT runs 24×7×365, with 48 half-hourly settlement batches every day. Each batch nets the credits and debits across all participating banks and posts the net positions to the participants' accounts at the RBI.
From a merchant or corporate reconciliation perspective, the operational consequence is that an NEFT credit shown on a bank statement settled in batch 23 (for example) carries a UTR with a timestamp at the close of that batch, not the time the originator initiated the transfer. Aligning gateway settlement reports with bank credits requires reconciling on UTR rather than on initiation timestamp.
NEFT is suitable for low-value, non-urgent transfers; high-value or time-critical transfers use RTGS. NEFT carries no upper limit per transaction, but banks may apply their own caps. Failure-and-return cycles can take several hours, which is itself a common reconciliation exception when a return credit appears days after the original debit.