The National Payments Corporation of India-owned UPI app BHIM has reported a revenue of Rs 3.7 crore for the financial year ending March 31, 2025, with losses at Rs 68 crore for the fiscal.
The figures are not comparable to the previous financial year (FY24) as BHIM was part of NPCI, and the organisation was hived off as a separate subsidiary only during the middle of the last fiscal.
BHIM’s valuation
BHIM, now registered as a for-profit entity and valued at Rs 59 crore at the time of hiving off as subsidiary, had received Rs 300 crore in funding by NPCI last fiscal, as exclusively reported by Moneycontrol in an effort to take on entrenched UPI behemoths - PhonePe and Google Pay.
The UPI app spent Rs 65 crore as marketing expenses in FY25, with a lion’s share going to customers as cashbacks and rewards. BHIM’s expenditure stood at Rs 106 crore last fiscal, with a majority likely incurred during the second half of FY24, after the entity was spun off.
BHIM's cash balance stood at Rs 11 crore at the end of FY25, indicating that at last year’s pace of expenditure, the company might have needed NPCI’s fund infusion during the second quarter of the current fiscal.
BHIM's performance
The fund infusion has yielded results, with BHIM quadrupling its transactions, surpassing 100 million in August after being spun off as a separate subsidiary. BHIM was the sixth-largest app in transaction value and eighth-largest in transaction volume.
Until last August, BHIM’s monthly transaction count had been hovering at around 25 million a month since September 2022, with hardly any growth.
In August 2024, NPCI also hired veteran banker Lalitha Nataraj as CEO for BHIM. A month later, BHIM started giving small cashbacks and promotions to users. BHIM holds a 0.4 percent market share in the UPI ecosystem, compared with market leaders PhonePe and Google Pay that hold around 45 percent and 35 percent market share, respectively.
Early days
During the initial days of UPI, BHIM was launched by Prime Minister Modi soon after demonetisation, to popularise digital payments. It was the largest UPI app, but fell out of favour with customers after Google Pay and PhonePe attracted users with handsome rewards and cashbacks.
As per an earlier directive of the NPCI, no single UPI app - other than bank apps - can have more than 30 percent market share. NPCI was hoping that BHIM would be able to gain market share from PhonePe and Google Pay, as it is concerned about the duopoly in UPI payments. Both apps are run by US multinationals.
New UPI apps rise through the ranks
NPCI runs UPI, the country's largest mobile payments platform. Over the last year or so, Sachin Bansal-led Navi, Flipkart’s subsidiary super.money and Razorpay-backed PoPclub have emerged as UPI-based platforms, to upstage established players like Amazon Pay, WhatsApp and Cred.
In 2024 alone, 20 companies received third-party application provider (TPAP) approval from NPCI, required to provide customers with UPI services. In total, 40 firms have received TPAP approval since 2016.
UPI is India's most-used digital payment method, processing around 88 percent of all digital transactions. UPI platform facilitates around 20 billion transactions in a month, worth around Rs 25 lakh crore.
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