At GFF today, NPCI Bharat Bill Pay Limited (NBBL) launched its whitepaper called ‘Building an Ecosystem of collection through BBPS’. This was followed by a panel discussion on ‘How India Collects and its changing landscape’ with Bhavesh Gupta, President & COO, Paytm came up on the stage along with Rana Ashutosh Kumar Singh, Deputy Managing Director (Transaction Banking and New Initiatives), State Bank of India (SBI); Vivek Gupta, President and Head- Wholesale Banking Products, Axis Bank; and Ravi Garg, Country Head, WhatsApp.
During the discussion, SBI’s Rana Ashutosh said that with the addition of services which the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) opened last year, the Bharat Bill Payment System (BBPS) can take up everything. “The way they have handled the expansion of the number of transactions and volume is amazing, there is growth of 22%,” he added.
Ashutosh also shared the data of 2017-18 and said that in the year saw 3,000 crore number of transactions with 2,000 trillion value of transactions. In five years, it has gone up to 13,000 crore, which shows that collection is changing.
Explaining how BBPS and other payments solution providers are making life of the consumers easier, he said, “For telecom you have to collect mobile payments, the government collects income tax. We are trying to make life easier for consumers. Years ago people used to stand in queues to pay bills but now it has changed.”
Paytm’s Bhavesh Gupta stated how multiple funding sources for collection are helping both merchants and consumers. “The big thing that has happened in the industry is that there are multiple funding sources for collection — one can pay through UPI, wallet and various other forms of credit. This choice has become a very big use case for a merchant to provide to its users,” he said.
“On the merchant side, the merchant now has all kinds of acquiring side solutions available. You can collect online, offline, at the counter, on an app, dynamic QR, static QR and more. This intersection has given users funding sources and merchants ways to collect,” Bhavesh added.
Saying payments have to remain affordable for the adoption to happen, he further added that overall everybody has to come together to make systems lighter and more trustworthy for the users and merchants to keep using. If these two things are continuously worked upon, which currently everybody is working upon be it bank or fintechs or the networks, much more scale of payments will be seen.
A system conceptualised by RBI as a one-stop ecosystem for all bill payments, BBPS is driven by NPCI. It provides an interoperable, cost-effective and easily accessible bill payments solution that has reshaped recurring payments in India. BBPS offers a wide range of bill collection categories at a single window like electricity, telecom, DTH, gas, water bills, etc. and also other repetitive payments like insurance premium, mutual funds, school fees, institution fees, credit cards, FASTag recharge, local taxes, housing society payments, etc.