UPI moment for B2B payments: Bharat Connect likely to go live by March

The NPCI subsidiary, which will follow the model similar to TPAPs, is conducting pilots with eight companies

National Payments Corporation of India’s (NPCI’s) bill-aggregation platform Bharat Connect is expected to roll out its Bharat BillPay for Business offering by March, according to two sources familiar with the matter.

 

Bharat Connect, which was earlier known as Bharat BillPay, will authorise companies to handle business-to-business (B2B) payments following a model similar to the issuances the NPCI provides to third-party application providers (TPAPs). TPAPs enable users to conduct transactions on India’s real-time payments system, the Unified Payments Interface (UPI).

 

“The issuances are similar to how the NPCI does it for TPAPs, which only cater to peer-to-peer (P2P) and peer-to-merchant (P2M).