Truecaller Pay To Go Live With Bharat Bill Payments Service In December

Truecaller Pay is set to go live with the Bharat Bill Payment System in early December with an aim to target India’s utility bill payments market. The Unified Payments Interface (UPI) based payments app has already started testing the feature with around 54 billers and will soon go live with all the billers on Bharat Bill Payments, said Sony Joy, head of payments and financial services at Truecaller.

“Everything that is required in the app is already out there and it’s just that we have to turn on more and more billers from the back-end. So, as and when we have more and more users coming in and trying more billers, we’ll bring up the remaining ones as well,” he said in an interview.

Bharat Bill Payments is an integrated bill payment system launched by National Payments Corp. of India (NPCI). According to the framework, a customer can pay several bills such as electricity, telephone, water, gas, and direct-to-home television at a single location—physical or electronic—and receive instant confirmation once the payment is made.

Truecaller Pay lets users create their unique virtual payment address in the Truecaller app, and allows instant transfer of money using any UPI supported bank.

“The only pre-requisite to use this feature would be that the users have linked their bank accounts with the Truecaller app. Based on the response of the users, we’ll also look at introducing other features to the app,” said Joy.

As of 31 October, there are 107 live billers on the platform, according to NPCI. In April, NPCI had said it is looking to get approvals from the Reserve Bank of India for other categories of recurring payments such as fee payments, monthly instalments and mutual funds payments which can eventually be offered on Bharat Bill Payments.

“Truecaller Pay is currently on-boarding 100,000 users on its UPI platform daily purely organically. It is even more remarkable that around 50% of all these new users are experiencing UPI (and some of them digital payments itself) for the first time through Truecaller Pay,” said Joy.

Truecaller claims to have around 250 million users globally, including more than 150 million in India. Joy said the Swedish caller identification app has around 40% of users from tier-II & III cities.

Truecaller Pay was launched in March 2017 for Android users and in July this year for iOS users. “Truecaller Pay will have at least 25 million users on-boarded by March just through organic channels. This shows the phenomenal growth story on the platform in the initial phases itself and a highly promising position in the digital payments ecosystem,” added Joy. – Live Mint