IMPS — Immediate Payment Service

IMPS moves money between two bank accounts instantly — unlike some other transfer modes, there is no waiting for the transfer to be processed in batches.

There are two ways to send an IMPS transfer. Through internet banking, you need the beneficiary's account number and their bank branch's IFSC code, the same details NEFT and RTGS use. Through mobile banking, you instead need the beneficiary's MMID — a short code the bank issues to the customer.

Because it is instant and works both ways (internet or mobile), IMPS sits between the older NEFT, which can take a few hours, and RTGS, which is built for very large, real-time transfers.

The booklet's description: IMPS is "Transfer of funds from one Bank account to another facilitating instant fund transfer." For a transfer through internet banking, "beneficiary's account number and IFSC Code... are needed." For a transfer through mobile banking, "beneficiary's MMID (Mobile Money Identifier is a 7 digit number issued by bank to the customer) is needed" instead.

Complete details on IMPS and other digital transfer modes are pointed to www.rbi.org.in and https://www.npci.org.in, since NPCI (the National Payments Corporation of India) operates the IMPS rails.

Zainab needs to send her brother Rs 25,000 urgently on a Sunday evening for a medical emergency.

NEFT would take a few hours to process and RTGS is meant for high-value real-time transfers, so she uses IMPS on her mobile banking app. She enters her brother's MMID and mobile number, confirms the Rs 25,000, and the money is credited to his account within seconds — even though it is a Sunday, outside normal banking hours.

Had she instead been transferring from her office desktop using internet banking rather than her phone, she would have needed his account number and IFSC code instead of his MMID, since the two channels ask for different identifiers even though both complete the transfer instantly.

Chapter 4 (Savings Related Products), Section E (Digital Banking), lists IMPS alongside NEFT, RTGS and UPI as the four modes of digital fund transfer, each with its own table of features. Expect a matching question pairing a transfer mode with its defining feature — IMPS with "instant" and MMID, NEFT with "no minimum/maximum," RTGS with "high value."

• MMID is a 7-digit number, used only for the mobile banking route, not the internet banking route.
• The internet banking route still uses account number and IFSC code, exactly like NEFT and RTGS — MMID is not a universal replacement for those details.
• The booklet's own text names the code once as "Indian Financial System Code" (in the NEFT and RTGS sections) and once as "Indian Financial Services Code" (in the IMPS section) — the workbook is inconsistent about the expansion of the letters IFSC even though it is the same code both times.
• IMPS works outside normal banking hours and on holidays, which is what makes it different from the older NEFT batches.