RBI expands scope of recurring payments to include school fees, insurance

BENGALURU: In a move that will widely benefit customers, RBI has expanded the scope of recurring payments via Bharat Bill Payment System (BBPS) for school fees, municipal taxes and insurance premiums. With the aim of making bill payment easy, since 2016-17 RBI has permitted recurring payments via BBPS for telephone, water, gas, direct-to-home (DTH) and electricity bills.

In a circular, RBI said it has been decided to expand the BBPS to include all categories of billers who raise recurring bills (except prepaid recharges) as eligible participants, on a voluntary basis.

RBI said detailed instructions in this regard will be issued by the end of September. “Apart from digitization of cash-based bill payments, these segments would also benefit from the standardized bill payment experience for customers, centralized customer grievance redressal mechanism, prescribed customer convenience fee and the like," said the RBI circular.

More customers have been using the platform year-on-year. In 2016-17, only 30,000 bills worth Rs 4 crore paid via the BBPS platform. By 2017-18, as high as 1 crore bills worth Rs 1,098 crore were paid using the platform. This number increased seven-fold to 7.35 crore bills worth Rs 9,099 crore.

Another move by RBI, which has made low-value, recurring payments faster and seamless is auto-pay. This August, RBI permitted customers to make recurring payments of less than Rs 2,000 without two-factor authentication if they gave an e-mandate for the concerned merchant.

Source: The Times of India