Walmart-backed PhonePay, the industry leader in facilitating Unified Payments Interface (UPI) payments since December 2020, accounted for almost half of all customer transactions on the Bharat Bill Payment System (BBPS) channel in August.

The Bengaluru-based Fintech startup processed 28 million customer transactions worth Rs 4,039 crore a month, while Bildesk was in second place with around 9.5 million transactions, according to figures released by the National Payments Corporation of India.

Paytm, HDFC Bank and Airtel Payments Bank are the other top processors in this category.

On the billers’ side, Billdesk, Paytm and Airtel Payments Bank dominated such transactions with 14.6 million, 8.1 million and 5.4 million transactions, respectively, according to data released for the first time.

NPCI did not disclose comparative data from previous months.

BBPS is an inter-operational and integrated bill payment system for agent-based settlement of online and recurring bills.

These transactions are processed by intermediaries called Bharat Bill Payment Operating Units (BBPOUs) as authorized operational units both on the biller side and the customer side.

The NPCI data also showed that private lender Axis Bank had onboarded the most number of billers (19,170) on this network, followed by ICICI Bank (17,986) and Kotak Mahindra Bank (497).

In terms of categories, electricity was the most common use case with 47% of transactions on BBPS in August used for such payment. This was followed by FASTag recharge (16.4%) and DTH payments (12.8%).

Other categories include mobile postpaid, loan repayments, LPG, water bills among others.

BBPS has seen strong traction since 2020, especially over the pandemic, as billers urged customers to make their recurring bill payments through this system to avoid crowding at payment counters and offices.

A total of 58.88 million transactions worth Rs 10,307 crore were processed in August, the data showed.

NPCI has transferred all its BBPS transaction mandates to a newly set up subsidiary called NPCI Bharat BillPay Ltd (NBBL), effectively hiving off its automated billing business.

All leading banks and aggregators such as State Bank of India, HDFC Bank and BillDesk, among others, are BBPOUs on the platform, processing monthly bill payments for thousands of telecoms, gas companies, discoms, educational institutes and other billers.