NPCI's Bharat BillPay spots a big opening in education fee payments

Digitising fee payments in the education sector has emerged as the next major opportunity for NPCI Bharat BillPay, which runs bill payments platform Bharat Connect, people aware of the matter said.

This comes after Bharat Connect (erstwhile Bharat Bill Payments System), which had started with digitising utility bill payments, entered into business-to-business payments as a new vertical last year.

“There are around 1.4 million schools and 48,651 colleges in the country with more than 300 million students enrolled, that is the opportunity in this space,” a senior banker said.

“Unlike other categories, education as a sector has seen a very slow uptick” in digitising payment, but now there is a push from the government to rapidly digitise this sector, the banker said. “Last year, central government schools were mandated to get into Bharat Connect, which was a major success. This year, they want to bring in private institutions as well.”

The idea is that fee requests of all these institutes will be raised as a bill on the network and parents/students can use any consumer-facing payment application like Google Pay, PhonePe or Paytm to make these payments, people cited above said.

At present, fees are paid mostly via bank branches or through institution websites that are typically not designed to handle large volumes of transactions.

"With a secure, standardised, and interoperable infrastructure, Bharat Connect is looking at simplifying institutional collections, making them more efficient and transparent while allowing the customers to use the app or website of their choice," said Noopur Chaturvedi, chief executive officer, NPCI Bharat BillPay, responding to ET's queries.

Industry insiders said there are around 1,100 universities in the country, out of which only 30 to 40 are on the Bharat Connect network.

Unlike other utility services, the education sector in India still runs on archaic systems and uses a lot of manual processes. This has made integrating them with Bharat Connect a challenging affair.

“Some institutions have monthly billing, some have quarterly cycles… There are many nuances in this sector,” a senior fintech industry executive said. “An ecosystem needs to be created like it was done for Fastag,” the person added.

NPCI BharatBillPay has licensed technology service providers like Noida-headquartered Plutos One to onboard these educational institutions and integrate them with the Bharat Connect network. It is also working with banks and enterprise software platforms to onboard schools and colleges into the network.

“The sector is gaining momentum since colleges do not have to bear any cost for integrating with Bharat Connect (while) customers can be charged a small fee when they are paying the bill,” said Rohit Mahajan, founder of Plutos One.

With the pricing passed on to the customer, institutions have no reason to resist this move, he said. “We are targeting to onboard all the universities in the country in the next one year,” he added.

Plutos One is currently processing Rs 150 crore in total payment value monthly and its target is to take this to Rs 10,000 crore by the end of the current financial year.

National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), which runs Unified Payments Interface, wants all corporate payments to be routed via Bharat Connect, industry insiders said.

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Bharat Connect is expected to see transaction volumes jump exponentially with credit card bill payments, utility bill payments and now institutions coming on the network.

In January 2025, Bharat Connect processed around 246 million transactions, almost double of 125 million transactions processed in January last year. And the amount settled via the network jumped to Rs 1.1 lakh crore in January 2025 from Rs 29,462 crore a year earlier.

Also Read: B2B fintech companies hop on Bharat Connect to get back in business