How NPCI's Bharat Connect aims to streamline B2B payments for small businesses
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Mumbai: After establishing a strong presence in the retail payments ecosystem, NPCI Bharat Connect is now developing an interlinked payments platform for small businesses.
Formerly NPCI Bharat BillPay Ltd, the business-to-business platform is developing a digital infrastructure for India's 63 million micro, small and medium enterprises, which account for 30-35% of India's GDP and employ about 110 million people, according to CEO Noopur Chaturvedi. "The attempt is to make all the systems talk to each other, remove the inefficiencies to make reconciliation much easier, and create a digital trail which can then lend itself for formalization of credit. That is definitely part of the process," Chaturvedi told Mint.
“While larger corporates have the advantage of very sophisticated systems and bespoke integrations and solutions from top banks, as you go down the value chain, the solutions are more umbrella and don't necessarily cater to the needs of businesses of different sizes," she said. Bharat Connect enables interoperability across different systems, allowing small businesses to streamline operations and reduce time spent on payment tracking and dispute resolutions.
Established in 2017, NBBL’s Bharat Bill Payments System (BBPS) was initially envisaged as a bill payment solution but has now extended operations to over 25 categories of payments. The platform currently processes more than 200 million transactions per month and aims for 1 billion monthly transactions in two to three years, Mint reported earlier.
Currently, 22,056 billers are live on the platform, and transaction values crossed ₹1 trillion in October. The separate vertical for B2B payments, targeted at MSMEs, was launched at
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