BHIM (Bharat Interface for Money) is an Indian

state-owned State ownership, also called public ownership or government ownership, is the ownership of an industry, asset, property, or enterprise by the national government of a country or state, or a public body representing a community, as opposed to ...

mobile payment 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. Instead of paying with cas ...

app developed by the

National Payments Corporation of India National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) is an Indian public sector company that operates retail payments and settlement systems in India. The organization is an initiative of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and the Indian Banks' Associa ...

(NPCI), based on the

Unified Payments Interface Unified Payments Interface, commonly known as UPI is an Indian instant payment system as well as protocol developed by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) in 2016. The interface facilitates inter-bank peer-to-peer (P2P) and pe ...

(UPI). Launched on 30 December 2016, it is intended to facilitate e-payments directly through banks and encourage cashless transactions. The application supports all Indian banks which use UPI, which is built over the

Immediate Payment Service Immediate Payment Service (IMPS) is an instant payment inter-bank electronic funds transfer system in India. IMPS offers an inter-bank electronic fund transfer service through mobile phones. The service is available 24/7 throughout the year in ...

(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. The app is named in honour of

B. R. Ambedkar Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (Bhīmrāo Rāmjī Āmbēḍkar; 14 April 1891 – 6 December 1956) was an Indian jurist, economist, social reformer and political leader who chaired the committee that drafted the Constitution of India based on t ...

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

Paytm Paytm (an acronym for "Pay Through Mobile") is an Indian Multinational corporation, multinational Fintech, financial technology company, that specializes in digital wallet, digital payments and financial services, based in Noida, India. Paytm ...

, MobiKwik,

M-Pesa M-PESA (M for mobile, ''PESA'' is Swahili language, Swahili for money) is a mobile banking, mobile phone-based money transfer service, payments and Micro-finance, micro-financing service, launched in 2007 by Vodafone and Safaricom, the largest ...

, 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 (Hindi: आधार, ) is a twelve-digit unique identity number that can be obtained voluntarily by all residents of India, based on their biometrics and demography, demographic data. The data is collected by the Unique Identification ...

authentication. BHIM will be made available on

Open Network for Digital Commerce Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) is a public technology initiative launched by the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT), Government of India to foster decentralized open e-commerce model and is led by a privat ...

(ONDC) in an effort to challenge

PhonePe PhonePe is an Indian digital payments and financial services company headquartered in Bengaluru, Karnataka, India. It was founded in December 2015, by Sameer Nigam, Rahul Chari and Burzin Engineer. The PhonePe app, based on the Unified Paymen ...

and Google Pay's hegemony.

On-device wallet

On September 20, RBI governor

Shaktikanta Das Shaktikanta Das (born 26 February 1957) is a retired People of India, Indian bureaucrat and Indian Administrative Service, IAS officer who served as the 25th List of Governors of Reserve Bank of India, governor of the Reserve Bank of India. Sinc ...

officially launched an 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 acc ...

recharges, insurance payments, and EMI collections offline.

Canara Bank Canara Bank is an Indian public sector bank based in Bangalore, India. Established in 1906 at Mangalore by Ammembal Subba Rao Pai. The bank was nationalized in 1969. Canara Bank also has offices in London, Dubai and New York. History Amm ...

HDFC Bank HDFC Bank Limited is an Indian banking and financial services company, headquartered in Mumbai. It is India's largest private sector bank by assets and market capitalisation. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has identified the HDFC Bank, Stat ...

Indian Bank Indian Bank is an Indian public sector bank, established in 1907 and headquartered in Chennai. It serves over 100 million customers with 40,002 employees, 5,901 branches with 5,268 ATMs and Cash deposit machines. Total business of the bank has ...

Kotak Mahindra Bank Kotak Mahindra Bank Limited is an Indian banking and financial services company headquartered in Mumbai. It offers banking products and financial services for corporate and retail customers in the areas of personal finance, investment banking, l ...

Punjab National Bank Punjab National Bank alias PNB is an Public sector banks in India, Indian government bank based in New Delhi. It was founded in May 1894 and is the List of banks in India, second-largest public sector bank in India in terms of its business volum ...

State Bank of India State Bank of India (SBI) is an Indian Multinational corporation, multinational Public sector undertakings in India, public sector bank and financial service body headquartered in Mumbai. It is the largest bank in India with a 23% market shar ...

Union Bank of India Union Bank of India (UBI) is an Indian public sector bank headquartered in Mumbai. It has 153+ million customers and a total business of Rs.22,92,644 crores as of 31 March 2025. After the merging with Corporation Bank and Andhra Bank, which c ...

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 proposed transaction charges on UPI transactions, but there is no information on whether transactions through BHIM will also be charged.

Language support

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

languages of India Languages of India belong to several list of language families, language families, the major ones being the Indo-Aryan languages spoken by 78.05% of Indian people, Indians and the Dravidian languages spoken by 19.64% of Indians; both fami ...

License

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

Reception

During the

2017 Union budget of India The 2017 Union Budget of India is the Union budget of India for the financial year 2017-2018. It was presented before the parliament on 1 February 2017 by the Finance Minister of India, Arun Jaitley with (US$336.39 billion) budget size. The ...

, 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 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 () is the central bank of Bhutan and is a member of the Asian Clearing Union. It is also the minting authority for the Bhutanese Ngultrum. The Royal Monetary Authority of Bhutan was established under the R ...

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

References

External links

* {{FinTech in India 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