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Bharat Interface for Money (BHIM) will continue to serve as a testing ground for industry-wide digital payment innovations as use cases around the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) scale up and the application (app) launches an improved version for users, a senior executive said.
“BHIM will continue to be the sandbox or reference app for initial payments. It is a responsibility that we carry because we are a wholly owned subsidiary of National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI). We will nurture products to an extent and ensure that everybody else adapts to them as part of our collaborative approach,” Lalitha Nataraj, chief executive officer, NPCI BHIM Services (NBSL), told Business Standard.
NBSL, a wholly owned subsidiary of the apex payments body, NPCI, rolled out the third version of its app on Tuesday.
It offers features such as a family mode for managing payments, the ability to work in low-internet areas, and a cleaner user interface (UI), among others.
The latest version, BHIM 3.0, will be rolled out in phases, with a full launch planned by April 2025.
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The BHIM app has also introduced cashbacks for customers using the app to process UPI transactions.
“We will be attempting small pockets of all this for acquisition, retention, and engagement strategies,” Nataraj added.
The NPCI subsidiary announced the launch of BHIM Vega, its foray into in-app payment solutions for online merchants. The feature integrates with digital merchants, allowing users to complete real-time payment transactions within the app without switching to third-party apps.
It also presented a proof of concept for BHIM Vishwas, which will enable it to provide banks with BHIM’s complete tech stack.
“The Vishwas feature is at a concept stage, where the idea is: if you are building BHIM as an app, why can’t you white-label it and put it under the hood of a bank’s mobile banking app? The bank can then focus on various banking features, while payments as a feature are borrowed and plugged in,” Nataraj added.
BHIM has partnered Bank of Baroda, Canara Bank, Karnataka Bank, and Union Bank for the product, which is still a work in progress.
At present, the BHIM app has over 226 million Android installs and more than 8.8 million iOS installs, according to the NPCI website.
UPI is India’s real-time payments system, run on NPCI’s rails.
“As of now, the number of UPI users is around 300–400 million. For a country with a population of 1.3-1.4 billion, that leaves a huge number still untapped. This is the potential market for BHIM to look forward to,” said Vivek Deep, executive director, Reserve Bank of India (RBI).
Deep added that new UPI products would need to be implemented promptly on the BHIM app to ensure it gains a first-mover advantage.
“Any new introduction of UPI features should be implemented in BHIM promptly to reap the first-mover advantage,” he added.
NBSL was spun off as NPCI’s wholly owned subsidiary in 2024.
Developed by NPCI, BHIM was launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2016.
In February, the application processed over 36.88 million UPI transactions and was ranked 15th on the UPI leaderboard.
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