All Public Sector Banks are expected to join the Bharat Interface for Money (BHIM) app for digital payments by the end of February, the National Payments Corporation of India said.
Introduced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in late December, the BHIM app enables digital transactions using the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and has been downloaded by 13.8 million users by the end of January. However, just 3.6 million users have linked the app to their bank account.
“The gap in the number of app downloads and the number of customers linking the app to their bank account has been because it is observed that most of these customers have downloaded BHIM without checking if their bank is active on the platform,” the NPCI added.
Public sector banks such as State Bank of India, Bank of India, Bank of Baroda and Union Bank of India, are among the 37 banks that have already come on board the BHIM platform. Corporation Bank, Punjab and Sind Bank and the five associate banks of SBI are also in the process of doing so.
“Since the customer base of PSBs is very large, their participation in BHIM is of crucial importance for the success of this app. Once they join, the user base will jump multiple times,” A.P. Hota, managing director and CEO of NPCI, said.
