The Reserve Bank of India RBI proposed on Friday to allow BBPS to accept cross-border payments for utility bill payments for their family in India.
BBPS, owned and operated by the National Payments Corporation of India NPCI, provides an interoperable platform for bill payment experience, with over 20,000 billers on board, and is currently accessible to people residing in India only.
More than 80 million transactions are processed on the payments platform on a monthly basis.
The RBI move is to make it easier for the NRIs who don't have access to a full suite of bill collectors or may not have a NRE account to make utility payments on behalf of their family.
This is a measure of convenience for NRIs and their relatives staying here. The idea is to be able to pay bills, electricity, and other utilities through a system and interface that will be provided by exchange houses or banks, said T Rabi Sankar, deputy governor, RBI.
Payment of bills of billers on the platform will be an issue that will benefit the platform in an interoperable manner. The RBI will come out with the necessary guidelines soon.
It offers a wide variety of bill collection categories, such as electricity, telecom, DTH, gas, water bills and other repetitive payments like insurance premium, mutual funds, school fees, credit cards, fastag recharge, local taxes and housing society payments at one single window. The payment mode options facilitated by the ecosystem are cards, debit, and prepaid NEFT Internet Banking, UPI, wallets, Aadhaar-based payments, and cash.
The goal is not to target more inward remittances. This is being provided to ease of payment for families, especially senior citizens who are unable to make their payments and whose children reside abroad, according to the RBI governor.
Pranay Jhaveri, managing director of India South Asia Euronet Worldwide said it was a step in the right direction to continue growing with a new use case.
This will be an additional enabler to broaden the scope and ease of access of the payment systems and will not be a material enhancer or inhibitor for forex inflows or fee income for various market participants, said Anil Gupta, Co group head financial sector ratings ICRA.