Mastering digital payment collection with BBPS Biller solution: A technical guide

Introduction

While collecting recurring bill payments from their customers, businesses end up spending 3-5% of the bill amount in operational costs. From setting up intricate tech infrastructure for online payments to hiring field agents for offline collections and investing extensive manual hours for reconciliation – the expenses add up. Bharat Bill Pay System (BBPS), introduced by NPCI, solves this by creating a payment network of 150+ digital payment channels and 35 lakh+ offline collection centres. By becoming a biller on the BBPS network, merchants can collect repeat payments from all these channels with minimal cost and effort. In the pursuit to bring this simplicity and ease in collecting bill payments for Indian businesses, Cashfree introduced the BBPS Biller Solution in November 2023. In this blog, let’s take a look at how the solution has made onboarding as a BBPS biller easy for businesses and helped businesses automate the bill collection journey, 

BBPS Biller Solution: Fast, easy and secure bill payment collection

Cashfree Payments introduced the BBPS Biller solution to help businesses minimise bill payment collection costs with an omnichannel presence and automatic reconciliation. 

Know more about billers, consumers and how BBPS benefits both here: Streamlining Bill Payments: A Closer Look at Bharat Bill Payment System (BBPS) (cashfree.com)

Let’s take a deep dive into how BBPS Biller solution works, and the steps you have to take to become a biller in the BBPS network. From initial setup to ongoing management, our comprehensive guide will walk you through each step, ensuring a smooth and successful integration.

Becoming a biller on Bharat Bill Payment System: Onboarding and next steps

Keeping pace with the evolving billing and payments landscape, BBPS Biller solution by Cashfree payments is designed to make the whole billing process seamless and cost-effective. For businesses collecting their repeat payments via BBPS, we can split the core workflows into 3 phases:

1. Getting listed as a biller – Onboarding
2. Driving transactions on BBPS network 
3. Automatic reconciliation and reporting

Onboarding

Onboarding as a biller on BBPS takes less than 3 weeks. NPCI has dictated certain requirements for a business to be listed as a biller. 

Steps to complete biller onboarding with BBPS Biller solution

1. Choose the right category for listing: The business must belong to one of the 21+ biller categories listed by Bharat Bill Pay. Here, Cashfree experts would help you choose the right category fit for your business.

2. Submit documents for verification: The business must submit certain documentation such as biller consent forms, settlement account form, signatory proof and other business-specific certificates (for example, lending companies need to submit their NBFC certificate)

3. Qualify technical requirements: The business should fulfil certain technical requirements

• Select customer input fields – The biller has to configure a unique identifier for each customer. The customer has to input this unique identifier once on the biller BBPS payment page to subscribe to the bill information. This identifier serves as a consistent data source across internal and external applications. You also have to select a regex which is applicable for this parameter according to which payment apps would display the keyboard layout. 
  Let us understand this with an example. Bound Parivar, a Nidhi company on BBPS, asks for loan number and nickname on the payment page. The loan number is the unique identifier that helps the payment app fetch the correct bill for the borrower who wishes to repay the loan amount.

• Select Amount Exactness – A biller must decide what is the kind of amount that they want to accept per payment – exactly equal to the bill amount, or allow the consumer to edit the amount and accept greater/less than the bill amount.

• Information Readiness per Bill – NPCI checks if the business has certain mandatory attributes to facilitate every bill fetch request. The biller can fulfil these requirements by having a direct API integration with Cashfree or with Cashfree’s plug and play No Code Solution.

API solution	No code solution
Optimal for businesses have a tech team and an API infrastructure in place	Perfect for businesses that prefer a plug and play solution
Real time sync of customers, transactions, payments and settlements via API calls from Cashfree.	Real-time sync of payments and settlements.
Data is synced directly from the business database.	Data is provided by the business to Cashfree as a .csv file.

4. NPCI Approval: If a business is eligible to become a biller and fulfils all the requirements listed above, then the next step is NPCI verification. To onboard as a Biller on the BBPS network, NPCI verifies if the business is qualified to be a biller or not.

Once NPCI approves your application to be a biller, it takes around 2 weeks for the biller to be listed across 150+ digital payment apps.

Start your journey as a BBPS biller with Cashfree experts now: Connect with an expert

Driving transactions on BBPS network

With that you would have onboarded as a biller on BBPS Biller solution.  The next step is to drive end-customer awareness on their payment options and BBPS. 

Let’s understand the transaction workflow with an example.

1. The end customer logs into Google Pay (or any payment app of their choice).
2. The customer searches for the biller name and goes to the biller BBPS page.
3. Here the customer enters their unique identifier which triggers the bill fetch request to Biller (API Solution) or Cashfree (No Code solution), after which the customer gets the bill details like amount due, due date, bill number, etc.
4. The customer can choose to pay immediately or later at their convenience, which is completely handled by the payment app. Once the payment is done, the confirmation is sent in real time to the biller.
5. The money is settled to the biller’s bank account in an aggregated manner as per the configured settlement cycles.

After the customer makes the payment for the first time, all the future bills are fetched automatically. This bill fetch functionality is one of the core workflows of BBPS.

Automatic reconciliation

Companies spend approximately 20-40 hours monthly on manual reconciliation of the payments made. BBPS Biller solution cuts down the time taken for reconciliation almost completely with real-time payments tracking and automatic reconciliation. As soon as the customer makes the payment, the biller can see the status of the payment on their Cashfree dashboard. The biller can also download a consolidated report for payments across apps from the dashboard.The funds are settled to the biller as per the configured settlement cycle.

Next steps and innovations

As a leader in India’s payments landscape, Cashfree Payments is consistently striving to improve the payments experience for businesses. Bharat Bill Pay System (BBPS) is a growing payment system which is literally changing the way bills are being paid for the better. Understanding the lack of ease in onboarding as a biller, Cashfree Payments introduced the BBPS Biller solution to help businesses be a part of the BBPS network and leverage easy payment collection. The dynamic solution is continuously evolving and the billers with Cashfree can look forward to innovative features like voice based payments, payments via Whatsapp, B2B payments, payments for NRIs and more in the near future.

Sign up to get started with BBPS Biller solution and create a seamless bill payment collection journey.