According to reports, the government's UPI-based consumer payments app, Bharat Interface for Money (Bhim), has nearly doubled its monthly transaction count in the last six months, reaching around 70 million in June.

Bhim, operated by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), had been stagnant for more than two years, processing approximately 25 million transactions per month between January 2022 and June 2024, before numbers began to increase.

Key Highlights

• NPCI slashes transaction barrier: cashbacks and incentives nearly double Bhim’s monthly transactions from 33 million to 75 million.
• With ₹150–200 crore marketing budget by NBSL, Bhim aggressively targets UPI share growth and bank integration.

The app reported 64.6 million transactions in May, a 91% increase from 33.8 million in January.

Bhim has revamped its user interface over the last year and is now increasing marketing and promotional spending.

"Some of the early trends show that the incentives are actually working, and consumers are getting back to using the app," said one of the participants. "In June, it would have processed around 70-75 million transactions, growing consistently."

Bhim has yet to break into the top ten UPI apps by transaction volume. Its share is less than 1%, with the UPI platform processing 18.4 billion transactions in June, according to the most recent NPCI data.

NPCI has yet to release the June numbers for each UPI application.

Bhim has a higher fund value than some of its peers. In May, for example, it settled Rs 11,243 crore, more than Amazon Pay's Rs 10,000 crore. The overall value of UPI transactions in May was Rs 25.14 lakh crore.

Also Read: UPI Transactions See Slight Decline in June, Totaling 18.4 Billion

Special focus

Bhim, founded in 2016 by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, was spun off into a separate corporate entity called NPCI Bhim Services Ltd (NBSL) in early 2024, led by ex-banker Lalitha Nataraj as CEO.

While the exact marketing budget for NBSL could not be determined, NPCI's overall marketing spends were Rs 774 crore in FY24, according to its most recent annual report.

NPCI wants to give Bhim a distinct brand identity and recall value as it encourages smaller UPI apps to scale up and reduce market concentration on two or three apps.

While most fintech companies offer cashbacks and discounts, Bhim runs targeted incentives on mobile recharges, bill payments, and FasTag recharges. Interestingly, bill payments on a few UPI applications require a separate service fee.

This comes at a time when top fintech platforms have drastically reduced UPI incentives. PhonePe reported spending only Rs 15 crore on payment incentives in FY 2024.

According to NPCI data from May, the average ticket size for transactions on Bhim is around Rs 1,756, a significant decrease from around Rs 3,500 a year ago.

"Consumers were using Bhim for very large ticket-sized payments," explained the second person cited above. "Now, a single payment transaction going down shows that the app is actually being used more for small value payments on a regular basis."

In addition to its own mobile application, NSBL has launched two new products: Vega and Vishwas. Vega enables merchants to process UPI payments within their own application, increasing transaction success rates. With Vishwas, NBSL gives banks the ability to accept UPI payments through their mobile banking applications.

"For those banks that do not promote UPI payments within their mobile application or may lack the technological capability to offer such features, they can use the Bhim platform to power QR code payments and inter-personal transactions from the app," said the person quoted above.

These transactions, which are powered by Bhim, will also increase the transaction count for the NPCI-run payments app in the UPI leaderboard.

Overall, the plan is for Bhim to power consumer payments as well as banks, allowing customers to make  UPI payments directly from their apps rather than having to use third-party applications, according to the people cited above.