The country's largest lender SBI has halved the daily cash withdrawal limit from ATMs for certain debit-card holders to Rs 20,000 from Wednesday.

The withdrawal limit has been curtailed on Classic and Maestro debit cards, held by a large number of the bank customers.

However, customers with other variants of SBI debit card can continue to enjoy higher daily withdrawal from ATMs.

As per a senior SBI official, the average cash withdrawal from ATMs per card is less than Rs 20,000 and the move will help in checking frauds and promote digital transaction.

About a month ago, the State Bank of India (SBI) had alerted its customers holding Classic and Maestro debit cards regarding reduction of cash withdrawal limit to Rs 20,000 a day from ATM starting October 31.

The SBI had put out the following message on its website: "Daily cash withdrawal limit for Classic and Maestro debit cards has been reduced from Rs 40,000 to Rs 20,000 per day with effect from October 31.

"If you require higher daily cash withdrawal limit, please apply for a higher card variant."

SBI Managing Director PK Gupta had said the reduction in withdrawal intends to protect customers from fraudulent cash withdrawals from ATMs and also to spur more digital transactions.

"We analysed all the ATM transactions and we found that most of them are less than Rs 20,000 a day. In case of frauds reported to us, we found that in all such cases withdrawals of Rs 40,000 (the maximum) have happened. So, this is basically to protect the customers and secondly, we want that more digital transactions should happen," Gupta had said.

If any customer wants higher limit of cash withdrawal, he or she can ask for a higher variant card.

When asked how many such customers/cards are to be impacted due to this reduced limit, he said a very large number of customers fall into this category.

However, the bank has lots of customers with higher variant debit card, so they are not impacted.