Over the last few weeks, Indian public sector banks have been branding their UPI apps with 'BHIM', the name of the government-supported UPI app run by the National Payments Corporation of India. Some private banks like Axis Bank and RBL have also been adding BHIM branding. The NPCI, set up by Indian banks, also created the UPI standard itself. One reason for that branding, aside from being eligible for sops, may be this — even as these banks roll out their own UPI apps, their customers are mostly flocking to BHIM and Flipkart-owned PhonePe. The data, obtained via RTI to multiple public sector banks by MediaNama, shows a huge disparity in registrations on banks' own UPI apps and in BHIM and PhonePe. Note that the data received by us varies on date (see note below), and is thus indicative of the percentage, at that time. Not all the banks gave a breakdown of all UPI registrations among their customers' bank accounts. Some did not even have the number of UPI registrations on apps that were not made by them. As such, the above information is based mostly on banks that shared specific UPI registration breakdown by VPA. BHIM muscles through BHIM has been wildly successful across all banks — more so than the banks' own UPI apps. In Allahabad Bank, BHIM has almost twice the number of registrations than the bank's own app. Allahabad Bank's UPI app has around 120,000 registrations, while BHIM has almost twice the number at 237,000. That's over 51%…
