Now, NRIs can pay parents' utility bills and children's school fees in India

• NRIs can now pay utility bills on behalf of their families in India.
  
• RBI has enabled NRIs to make bill payments using the Bharat Bill Payment System which has 20,000 billers on it.
  
• Charges and convenience fees to be uniform across the platform and better complaint redressal mechanism.

Sitting in the comfort of their homes, non-resident Indians will soon be able to pay utility bills on behalf of their parents in India. The Reserve Bank of India’s Governor Shaktikanta Das on Friday announced that the central bank would enable the Bharat Bill Payment System (BBPS) to process inbound cross-border payments.

Governor Das said that the Bharat Bill Payment System (BBPS) was an interoperable platform for standardized bill payments. He said, “It is now proposed to enable BBPS to accept cross-border inward bill payments.

This will enable Non-Resident Indians (NRIs) to undertake bill payments for utility, education and other such payments on behalf of their families in India. This will greatly benefit the senior citizens in particular.”

The bill payment system has made bill payments relatively easy for users in India.

Currently, 20,000 billers are part of the system, and more than 80 million transactions are processed on a monthly basis.

This will help senior citizens in India with children working abroad. The scope of offering has now been expanded to non-resident Indians too, who can now pay for children’s school fees and utility bills using this platform.

The BBPS offers a reliable payment mechanism with predictable and uniform convenience fees across billers.

Explains Muralidharan Srinivasan, head of payments, APMEA Region, FIS, “NRIs will now be able to enjoy various offerings of BBPS such as a reliable bill payment experience, centralized customer grievances redress mechanism, and uniform customer convenience fee, while paying utility bills, education-related payments and other cross-border transactions.”

The RBI has taken several measures to improve cross-border transactions, especially inbound.

The central bank has been testing different models of cross-border payments through the regulatory sandbox route. In September 2021, the RBI received 27 applications from 26 entities, of which eight entities have been selected for the ‘test phase’.

The entities began testing their products from the third week of September 2021 to offer a variety of cross-border payment solutions for Indians and NRIs.

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