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Frequently Asked Questions
National Electronic Funds Transfer (NEFT) is a nation-wide payment system facilitating one-to-one funds transfer. Under this Scheme, individuals, firms and corporates can electronically transfer funds from any bank branch to any individual, firm or corporate having an account with any other bank branch in the country participating in the Scheme.
The acronym 'RTGS' stands for Real Time Gross Settlement, which can be defined as the continuous (real-time) settlement of funds transfers individually on an order by order basis (without netting). 'Real Time' means the processing of instructions at the time they are received rather than at some later time.
NEFT is an electronic fund transfer system that operates on a Deferred Net Settlement (DNS) basis which settles transactions in batches. In DNS, the settlement takes place with all transactions received till the particular cut-off time. These transactions are netted (payable and receivables) in NEFT whereas in RTGS the transactions are settled individually. For example, currently, NEFT operates in hourly batches - there are eleven settlements from 9 am to 7 pm on week days and five settlements from 9 am to 1 pm on Saturdays. Any transaction initiated after a designated settlement time would have to wait till the next designated settlement time. Contrary to this, in the RTGS transactions are processed continuously throughout the RTGS business hours.
It is essential to furnish the IFSC Number of the receiving branch apart from providing details of the beneficiary account.
IFSC or Indian Financial System Code is an alpha-numeric code that uniquely identifies a bank-branch participating in the NEFT system. This is an 11 digit code with the first 4 alpha characters representing the bank, and the last 6 characters representing the branch. The 5th character is 0 (zero). IFSC is used by the NEFT system to identify the originating / destination banks / branches and also to route the messages appropriately to the concerned banks / branches.
Bank-wise list of IFSCs is available with all the bank-branches participating in NEFT/ RTGS. List of bank-wise branches participating in NEFT/RTGS and their IFSCs is also available on the website of Reserve Bank of India at http://www.rbi.org.in/ and data mirrored on this website.
All the banks have also been advised to print the IFSC of the branch on cheques issued to their customers. For net banking customers many banks have enabled online search / pop-up of the IFSC of the destination bank branch.