RBI opens Bharat Bill Payment Service to all categories of billers
At present, the interoperable platform for repetitive bill payments (BBPS) covers five segments including - direct-to-home (DTH), electricity, gas, telecom, and water bills.
To digitise cash-based bill payments, the apex bank in the country has opened the Bharat Bill Payment System (BBPS) to all categories of billers to ensure the full potential of the platform is being harnessed.
At present, the interoperable platform for repetitive bill payments (BBPS) covers five segments including - direct-to-home (DTH); electricity; gas; telecom; and water bills. In a statement, RBI said,
“In order to leverage the advantages of the BBPS and harness its full potential, it has been decided to permit all categories of billers (except prepaid recharges) who provide for recurring bill payments to participate in BBPS on a voluntary basis.”
The RBI also added,
“Apart from digitisation of cash-based bill payments, these segments would also benefit from the standardised bill payment experience for customers, centralised customer grievance redressal mechanism, prescribed customer convenience fee and the like.”
The apex bank is expected to issue a detailed instruction in this regard by the end of September 2019.
Bharat Bill Payment System is a Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) conceptualised ecosystem, managed by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), which offers integrated, accessible and interoperable bill payment services to consumers across geographies with certainty, reliability and safety of transactions.
It offers bill payment service to consumers through a network of agents, retail shops, bank-branches and digital channels like internet banking, mobile apps, websites of banks and non-bank entities.
Bharat BillPay also supports various payment modes including cards (Credit, Debit and Prepaid), NEFT internet banking, UPI, wallets, as well as Aadhaar based payments.
As of last month (July 2019), the total volume of payments transacted on the BBPS infrastructure stands at 67.85 million with a total of Rs 1740 lakh crores transacted on the platform in the same month.
A total of 338 million transactions took place on the BBPS network, over the course of the financial year 2018-19.
(Edited by Saheli Sen Gupta)
