Credit cards dominate bill payments on Bharat Connect

Credit card bill payments have emerged as the largest category in terms of value of bills settled on Bharat Connect, a platform run by the National Payments Corporation of India-powered NPCI Bharat Billpay.

In terms of value of funds settled, 64% of the transactions are for credit card bill payments followed by electricity payments and loan repayments, both around 13%. In terms of the number of transactions, 28% of the transactions were for electricity bill payments followed by credit cards and Fastag recharges.

Following the regulatory diktat, last year banks moved all their third-party credit card bill payments to the Bharat Connect platform. This resulted in applications like Cred settling their customers’ credit card dues via the NPCI-managed network from September.

As of December, Cred has settled Rs 32,736 crore through Bharat Connect, becoming a larger player than BillDesk and PhonePe, which were the dominant customer facing fintechs in this space till recently.

However, in terms of the number of transactions, PhonePe is way ahead of competition given the wide range of services provided by the app which runs on the Unified Payments Interface network.

In December, PhonePe settled 91.2 million transactions followed by 65 million done through BillDesk. In comparison, Cred settled around 24 million bill payment transactions.