The National Payments Corporation of India — an umbrella organisation for all retail payment systems in India — is quite hopeful that all public sector banks (PSBs) will, by this month-end, adopt the Bharat Interface for Money (BHIM), a digital payments app built on Unified Payments Interface(UPI).

As on date, as many as 37 banks, including state-owned banks such as State Bank of India, Bank of India, Bank of Baroda and Union Bank of India, are part of BHIM platform.

BHIM aims to make sending, requesting and receiving money directly to and from bank accounts fast and easy.

Indications are that PSBs such as Corporation Bank, Punjab and Sind Bank and the five associate banks of State Bank of India will soon go live on BHIM.

Even as public sector banks have started adopting the UPI platform in a big way, there are several including State Bank of India and Punjab National Bank that had already embraced digital payments through their own e-wallets such as SBI Buddy and PNB Kitty. Now with the increased adoption of UPI, the e-wallets of banks are facing the heat, say banking industry observers.

“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 AP Hota, Managing Director and CEO, NPCI.

Between December 30 last year, when BHIM was launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and January 31 this year, the number of people who had downloaded BHIM stood at 13.8 million. Out of these, as many as 3.6 million customers have linked the app to their bank account.

There is a gap between the number of app downloads and the number of customers linking the app to their bank accounts as many of them had downloaded BHIM without checking if their bank is active on the platform.

It may be recalled that NPCI had earlier this month launched a new version 1.2 for BHIM with additional features like pay to Aadhaar number, spam report, improvised customer redressal mechanism with a drop down menu. The new version also supported new languages, apart from English and Hindi.

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