The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) is planning to hive-off its bill payments platform, Bharat Bill Payment System (BBPS), into a separate entity called 'NPCI Bharat BillPay', the Financial Express reported citing unnamed sources. NPCI Bharat BillPay will be the second subsidiary for the umbrella retail payments organisation, after NPCI International Payments Limited. BBPS is an inter-operable bill payments platform that banks, fintechs, payment companies and biller merchants use to send bills to customers and accept payments on behalf of merchants. At present, there are 341 billers from telecom companies, utility providers, insurers to DTH operators and close to 19,000 educational institutions using BBPS for recurring payments. In November this year, there were nearly 24 million transactions worth ₹3,713 crore on the BBPS platform. However, compared to NPCI's flagship platform Unified Payment Interface, BBPS' adoption has not kicked off and is only one-tenth of UPI's size; in November, UPI clocked nearly ₹3.9 lakh crore worth of transactions. Between April and November, there were over ₹19.35 lakh crore transactions on UPI compared to ₹21,900 crore on BBPS. !function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",(function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var e in a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var t=document.getElementById("datawrapper-chart-"+e)||document.querySelector("iframe[src*='"+e+"']");t&&(t.style.height=a.data["datawrapper-height"][e]+"px")}}))}(); The NPCI did not respond to queries sent by us. According to the BBPS website, as of November, India Ideas (Bill Desk), Paytm Payments Bank, Airtel Payments Bank, Infibeam Avenues and Axis Bank were the top five BBPS operators based on volume of transactions on the billers' side, while HDFC Bank and ICICI Bank were in contention with Bill Desk, Paytm and Airtel. It is interesting…
