Mumbai: National Payments Corporation of India India has asked payment apps to stop charging platform fees for enabled payments on the bill payment platform. it is in the light of reserve Bank of India Coming up with a discussion paper on paying fees in the country. The government is also keen to adopt the Unified Payment Interface.is i) as a public good for which customers do not have to pay.

Last year, PhonePe, which accounts for a major chunk of UPI transactions in India, has started charging for some mobile recharges and other payments. The company had described the move as an experiment to test the willingness of consumers to pay a small fee for the transaction. In July,

has also started charging Re 1 for bill payments on its platform.

However in the second week of August NPCI He is understood to have written to payment apps asking them to stop charging even this small fee. Paytm officials said that they have stopped charging immediately from this month. PhonePe has said that it has stopped charging for transactions Bharat Bill Payment The platform, however, said that the charges which are visible are for services where it has made direct contact with the biller without going through BBPS. These include some credit card bill payments and some mobile recharges.

BBPS enables anywhere-anytime bill payments for utilities and other billers like insurance companies, credit cards, membership fees, FASTag and municipal charges. Before BBPS there were many aggregators which brought their merchants on a single platform and payment companies used to connect with these aggregators.

“We have been running experiments on charging platform fees across categories for some time now. The results look promising, and reflect the fact that a very large majority (98%) of Indian consumers are willing to pay a nominal fee for the convenience offered by PhonePe. For now, we have temporarily stopped our platform fee experiments on all eligible BBPS categories. We will share our experimental findings with NPCI/BBPS, and then seek their support in standardizing the nominal platform fee,” PhonePe said in an email response. NPCI did not immediately respond to queries.