NPCI expects all public sector banks to join BHIM by February-end

NPCI expects all public sector banks to join BHIM by February-end

New Delhi: With the aim to scale up the usage of Bharat Interface for Money or BHIM, the National Payments Corp. of India (NPCI) is working to ensure that all the public sector banks (PSBs) are integrated to the app by the end of this month.

“The PSBs which will go live very soon on the platform are Corporation Bank, Punjab and Sindh Bank and five associates of State Bank of India. We are working with these seven banks to ensure that all of them are a part of the platform by the end of this month,” said A. P. Hota, managing director & chief executive officer, NPCI, in a statement.

Currently, 37 banks are already integrated to BHIM including PSBs like State Bank of India, Bank of India, Bank of Baroda and Union Bank of India. With the seven banks joining the platform very soon, all the PSBs will be a part of BHIM’s interface.

“Since the customer base of PSBs is very large, their participation in BHIM is of crucial importance for the success of this app. We are confident that once all PSBs are a part of BHIM, the user base will jump multiple times,” said Hota.

The app was launched on December 30 by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to promote digital transactions using the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), a bank-to-bank fund transfer system backed by internet and smartphones, using phone numbers linked to banks.

According to NPCI, till 31 January, 13.8 million customers downloaded the app out of which 3.6 million customers have linked the app to their bank account.

“The gap in the number of app downloads and the number of customers linking the app to their bank account has been because it is observed that most of these customers have downloaded BHIM without checking if their bank is active on the platform,” the statement added.

Last month, a new version 1.2 was launched with additional features like ‘Pay to Aadhaar Number’, and spam report’. The new version also has seven new languages apart from English and Hindi.

Source:BusinessFortnight