The Reserve Bank of India issued operational guidelines to facilitate payments among prepaid instruments.

The guidelines released Oct. 16 detail requirements for achieving interoperability for mobile wallets and cards. Interoperability allows a payment system to be used in conjunction with other payment systems and allows issuers, system providers and participants in different systems to clear and settle payment transactions across multiple systems.

The RBI said that interoperability among mobile wallets and between bank account and e-wallets should be enabled through the unified payments interface system. If the prepaid payment instruments are issued in the form of cards, the cards shall be affiliated to the authorized card networks.

Card networks are allowed to onboard prepaid payment instrument issuers to join their network. Nonbank issuers can participate as members of authorized card networks.