What to do when a NEFT Transfer fails?

I think National Electronic Funds Transfer (NEFT) is one of the most commonly services used in Internet Banking in India. Started more than 10 years ago in 2005, NEFT has become an integral part our daily lives. Quick and reliable, it has slowly replaced payments through cheques as the transfer gets done within two hours nowadays.

Though rare, a NEFT transfer may fail due to some technical glitch. It may happen at the time of heavy load of payments during the last day of the month or so. Here’s what you need to do, in case your NEFT transfer fails i.e remitter account is debited but the beneficiary account is not credited with the amount!

1. NEFT Reference Number : Make sure you take note of the reference number of NEFT transfer. This will be present in the NEFT acknowledgement receipt got after you do the NEFT transfer from your bank account. So, it is important that you save the receipt in your desktop/laptop/smartphone.
2. Contact Remitter Bank : Contact the remitter bank’s NEFT Customer Facilitation Centre (CFC). The contact numbers are present in the Reserve Bank of India’s website. Keep the NEFT reference number handy while enquiring about the transfer. They will be able to give you information like whether the amount has gone to the beneficiary bank or not and in what batch it was transferred to the destination bank.
3. Contact Destination Bank : If the amount has gone to the destination bank, then one needs to contact the destination bank’s NEFT Customer Facilitation Centre (CFC) with the NEFT reference number. Again, you will find contact numbers in RBI’s website for contacting them. These guys should be able to give approximate time frame by which amount may be credited to the beneficiary bank account.
4. Last Resort - Contact RBI : Even after contacting the destination bank, if the issue is not resolved satisfactorily, the NEFT Help Desk of RBI can be contacted through.
1. e-mail : nefthelpdeskncc@rbi.org.in
2. Post correspondence to
General Manager 
Reserve Bank of India, 
National Clearing Centre, 
First Floor, Mumbai Regional Office, 
Fort Mumbai 400001

Note : RBI mandates that if the destination bank is not able to credit the amount to beneficiary bank account, they are required to return the transaction amount to the remitting branch within two hours of completion of the batch in which the transaction was processed. But this may not be always followed. Like in my case, it may happen that they don’t credit the amount back to the remitter account but they would credit the amount to the beneficiary account within a day or two!

For more information of NEFT please read the FAQs in NEFT by RBI.