The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) will allow the Bharat Bill Payment System (BBPS) to accept the cross border inward bill payments to help non-resident Indians (NRIs) to make bill payments for utilities, education, and other payments on behalf of their families and parents living in India, Governor Shaktikanta Das said on Friday.
The BBPS is an interoperable platform for standardised bill payments. This has transformed the bill payment experience for users in India.
Das, while announcing the policy rate hike of 50 basis points (bps) to 5.40 per cent, said, “It is now proposed to enable BBPS to accept cross-border inward bill payments. This will enable 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. This will also benefit payment of bills of any biller onboarded on the BBPS platform in an interoperable manner. Necessary instructions will be issued shortly.”
Over 20,000 billers are part of the system, and more than eight crore transactions are processed on a monthly basis. He said the RBI will soon come out with comprehensive guidelines on outsourcing of activities by commercial banks, regional rural banks (RRB), housing finance companies and others.
According to him, the central bank will come out with a draft Master Direction on Managing Risks and Code of Conduct in Outsourcing of Financial Services for comments from stakeholders.
According to the RBI, the scope of these directions is being expanded to also include RRBs, Local Area Banks (LABs), All India Financial Institutions, Credit Information Companies, and non-scheduled Payments Banks.
In order to leverage the potential of Standalone Primary Dealers, the RBI will allow them to offer all foreign exchange market-making facilities as currently permitted to Category-I Authorised Dealers, subject to prudential guidelines.
This measure will provide customers with a wider set of market makers to manage their foreign currency risk. This will also increase the breadth of the forex market in India.
The SPDs will be permitted to undertake transactions in the offshore Rupee Overnight Indexed Swap (OIS) market with NRIs and other market makers.
This measure will supplement a similar measure announced in February this year for the banks. These measures are expected to remove the segmentation between onshore and offshore OIS markets and improve price discovery.