BHIM (Bharat Interface for Money) is an Indian

mobile payment A mobile payment, also referred to as mobile money, mobile money transfer and mobile wallet, is any of various payment processing services operated under financial regulations and performed from or via a mobile device, as the cardinal class of d ...

app developed by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), based on the Unified Payments Interface (UPI). Launched on 30 December 2016, it is intended to facilitate e-payments directly through banks and encourage cashless transactions. It was named after the dalit leader Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar. The application supports all Indian banks which use UPI, which is built over the Immediate Payment Service (IMPS) infrastructure and allows the user to instantly transfer money between 170 member banks of any two parties. It can be used on all mobile devices.

Operation

BHIM allows users to send or receive money to or from UPI payment addresses, or to non-UPI based accounts (by scanning a

QR code A QR code (an initialism for quick response code) is a type of matrix barcode (or two-dimensional barcode) invented in 1994 by the Japanese company Denso Wave. A barcode is a machine-readable optical label that can contain information about th ...

with account number and IFS code or MMID code). Unlike mobile wallets (

Paytm Paytm (acronym for "pay through mobile") is an Indian digital payments and financial services company, based in Noida. It was founded in 2010 by Vijay Shekhar Sharma under One97 Communications. The company offers mobile payment services to co ...

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, mPesa, Airtel Money, etc.) which hold money, the BHIM app is only a mechanism which transfers money between different bank accounts. Transactions on BHIM are nearly instantaneous and can be done at any time, including weekends and bank holidays. BHIM now also allows users to send or receive digital payments through

Aadhaar Aadhaar ( hi, आधार, ādhār, lit=base, foundation, bn, আধার) is a 12-digit unique identity number that can be obtained voluntarily by the citizens of India and resident foreign nationals who have spent over 182 days in twelve ...

authentication.

On-Device wallet

On September 20, RBI governor

Shaktikanta Das Shaktikanta Das (born 26 February 1957) is serving as the current & 25th governor of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). He was earlier a member of the FifteenthFinance Commission and India's Sherpa to the G20. Das is a retired 1980batch Indian Ad ...

officially launched on-device wallet called UPI Lite at Global Fintech Fest 2022. As per NPCI, some of the early use cases involve

FASTag FASTag is an electronic toll collection system in India, operated by the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI). It employs Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology for making toll payments directly from the prepaid or savings ac ...

recharges, insurance payments, and EMI collections offline.

Canara Bank Canara Bank is an Indian public sector bank under the control and ownership of Ministry of Finance, Government of India. Established in 1906 at Mangalore by Ammembal Subba Rao Pai, the bank also has offices in London, Dubai and New York. Hist ...

HDFC Bank HDFC Bank Limited (also known as HDB) is an Indian banking and financial services company headquartered in Mumbai. It is India's largest private sector bank by assets and world's 10th largest bank by market capitalisation . It is the third lar ...

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Kotak Mahindra Bank Kotak may refer to: *Kotak (band), an Indonesian rock band *Kotak (surname), surname and people who bear it *Kotak Mahindra Bank, an Indian financial service firm *Kotak Securities, subsidiary of Kotak Mahindra Bank *Kotak, Iran (disambiguation) *Qa ...

Punjab National Bank Punjab National Bank (abbreviated as PNB) is an Indian public sector bank headquartered in Delhi. The bank was founded in May 1894 and is the second largest government-owned bank in India, both in terms of its business volumes and its network ...

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Union Bank of India Union Bank of India, commonly referred to as Union Bank or UBI, is an Indian public sector bank headquartered in Mumbai. It has 120+ million customers and a total business of US$106 billion. After the amalgamation with Corporation Bank and An ...

and Utkarsh Small Finance Bank enabled UPI Lite feature on BHIM.

Transaction fees and limits

Currently, there is no charge for transactions from ₹1 to ₹100,000. Some banks might, however, levy a fee for UPI or IMPS transfers. In 2017 Indian banks have proposed transaction charges on UPI transactions, but there is no information on whether transactions through BHIM will also be charged.

Language support

The app currently supports 20 languages (including English), and is expected to support all 22 recognised

languages of India Languages spoken in India belong to several language families, the major ones being the Indo-European languages spoken by 78.05% of Indians and the Dravidian languages spoken by 19.64% of Indians, both families together are sometimes known ...

License

NPCI on 9 November 2022 announced that BHIM app will use an open source license model. All regulated financial entities can now use the source code and in future release the same functionalities that BHIM app uses.

Reception

During the

2017 Union budget of India The 2017 Union Budget of India is the * Annual Financial Statement (AFS) mandated by Article 112 of Constitution of India * Demands for Grants mandated by Article113 of Constitution of India * Appropriation Bill mandated by Article 114(3) of Co ...

, Finance Minister

Arun Jaitley Arun Jaitley (28 December 1952 – 24 August 2019) was an Indian politician and attorney. A member of the Bharatiya Janata Party, Jaitley served as the Minister of Finance and Corporate Affairs of the Government of India from 2014 to 2019. Jait ...

said that the app is currently being used by over 12.5 million Indian citizens, and that the government will launch two new schemes to promote its use. One will be referral payments for individuals, and the other will be cashback for merchants who accept payments. In October 2021, the BHIM UPI platform surpassed a record of $100 billion in value (₹7.71 trillion, or 7.71 lakh crore) with over 4.2 billion digital transactions. Earlier in 2021, Bhutan became the first country to adopt the BHIM UPI for their digital transactions after the approval of the

Royal Monetary Authority of Bhutan The Royal Monetary Authority of Bhutan ( dz, བྲུག་རྒྱལ་གཞུང་དངུལ་ལས་དབང་འཛིན་) is the central bank of Bhutan and is a member of the Asian Clearing Union. It is also the minting aut ...

Security

In May 2020, VPNMentor, a cyber security firm, disclosed that the BHIM app suffered a huge data breach leaking approximately 7.26 million Indian users' personal and financial data, such as name, contact details, Aadhaar card,

PAN card A permanent account number (PAN) is a ten-character alphanumeric identifier, issued in the form of a laminated "PAN card", by the Indian Income Tax Department, to any "person" who applies for it or to whom the department allots the number wit ...

, caste certificate, fingerprint scans, educational certificates and more. The 4.09 GB files were leaked from a CSC operated website because of a misconfigured AWS S3 bucket, and not the official BHIM website.

CSC CSC, Csc or CSc may refer to: Awards * Conspicuous Service Cross (disambiguation) ** Conspicuous Service Cross (Australia) ** Conspicuous Service Cross (New York) ** Conspicuous Service Cross (United Kingdom) Science and industry * Cancer ...

explicitly mentioned, however, that it is working with BHIM and NCPI in partnership. VPNMentor and other cybersecurity experts confirm the data to be authentic, but BHIM and NCPI claim that the breach never took place. The issue has now been fixed.

References

External links

* {{Mobile payments Financial services companies established in 2016 Mobile payments in India 2016 establishments in India Android (operating system) software IOS software Cross-platform software Modi administration initiatives Cybercrime in India