Nepal raises wallet loading cap to 50 a day for festivals
The central bank has temporarily relaxed a wallet rule for Dashain, Tihar and Chhath, while its intelligence unit warns that fraudsters work the same festive traffic.
Nepal's festival season has a payments problem that few visitors would guess at: the rule that limits how often a person can top up a wallet. Under the standard directive, ten loads in a day is the ceiling. For a family sending dakshina, the cash gifts given during Dashain, to many relatives, that ceiling is easy to reach.
Nepal Rastra Bank (NRB), the central bank, has temporarily raised that ceiling from 10 loads a day to 50 for individual wallet holders. On 16 October 2026, its Financial Intelligence Unit also warned that online fraud is rising and that scammers tend to become more active when festival spending peaks.
The two announcements come from one institution and pull in different directions. Read together, they show a regulator trying to move festival spending onto digital channels while acknowledging that more traffic gives criminals more cover.
What the central bank changed
The change revises the Unified Directive on the Payment System, the rulebook for licensed payment service providers. A circular from the bank's Payment Systems Department tells those providers that the higher cap applies in two windows: 17 to 25 October 2026, for Bada Dashain, and 7 to 15 November 2026, for Tihar and Chhath. In the Nepali calendar these run from Asoj 31 to Kartik 8, and from Kartik 21 to Kartik 29, 2083 BS.
Source: Nepal Rastra Bank circular, as reported by Online Khabar and Clickmandu
The bank says the aim is to encourage digital payment for festive transactions, including dakshina. It had already asked the public to pay dakshina digitally during the three festivals. A cap of 10 sat awkwardly beside that appeal, since anyone sending small sums to many recipients would reach it quickly.
Why it matters beyond the festival
Festivals compress a large share of family gifting and shopping into a few days. For wallet operators, the two windows are both a stress test and a commercial opportunity. More permitted loads can mean more transactions and more habitual use, which wallet businesses need if they are to become everyday instruments.
The central bank has also ordered every payment service provider to send the Payment Systems Department the number of transactions and the total amounts processed under the relaxed threshold during the two periods.
That data could inform later decisions. If providers report little use near the new ceiling, the old limit may not have been the main brake on digital adoption. If use is heavy, the case for a more flexible permanent limit would strengthen. The bank has not said which result it expects.
The warning on the other side
The Financial Intelligence Unit, the NRB body that analyses suspicious financial activity, cites its own analysis of banking transactions to say online fraud cases have been rising.
It describes several likely schemes. Some use messages promising festival prizes, such as a "Dashain dhamaka", then demand upfront payment for supposed fees or taxes. Others imitate bank or wallet websites and threaten to close accounts unless customers update their identity details, a route to stealing passwords, one-time codes and personal data. Online sellers advertising steep discounts may collect money and then vanish or cut off the buyer. Accounts may also be set up with another person's identity papers or forged documents and used for crime.
Where the two decisions meet
The intelligence unit asks banks, financial institutions and digital service providers to tighten identity checks for accounts opened online. It wants closer watch on several accounts under different names that share an address or mobile number, and better systems for flagging suspicious transactions. It also asks them to train staff before the festivals and to warn customers by text message and on social media.
For wallet providers, a commercial opportunity and a compliance test arrive together. Reporting to the Payment Systems Department is mandatory, while the fraud measures are requests from the intelligence unit. Providers with weak onboarding checks or thin monitoring are likely to be exposed. Those with sound identity verification can show regulators and customers that higher volumes need not mean higher losses.
What to watch
- Whether the limit returns to 10. The relaxation is temporary. Any extension or permanent change would signal confidence in the controls.
- Fraud data after Tihar and Chhath. Further figures from the Financial Intelligence Unit or the police cyber bureau would show whether the warnings proved well founded.
- Onboarding scrutiny. Watch for tighter checks on accounts that share an address or mobile number, which the intelligence unit has singled out.
- Consumer behaviour. If households embrace digital dakshina, wallet firms gain a durable use case. If scams dominate, trust could suffer.
How this story was made: researched and written by The Standard’s desk with AI assistance, from the published reporting and official data credited below, and checked against those sources. Our standards.
