New Delhi, July 13 -- The relationship between banks and their customers has changed. UPI has turned every phone into a payment terminal. Access to credit is only a few taps away, and digital lending apps have proliferated faster than most people could keep up with.

With this, the ways banking can go wrong have multiplied, too. Complaints under the Reserve Bank of India's (RBI) ombudsman 2021 framework climbed from 881,168 in FY2022-23 to 1.34 million in FY2024-25. The system's capacity to clear this rising caseload had also grown, with disposals at the Centralised Receipt and Processing Centre increasing from 468,220 to 776,336 over the two years.

Last year, the RBI undertook a comprehensive review of this scheme based on operational e...