The BHIM app of National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) has made a tremendous comeback. Its monthly UPI transactions have increased almost tenfold in the last two years, and the platform is also preparing to expand into other services besides payments. According to NPCI data, BHIM had done 23 million transactions in June 2024, which increased to 224 million in June 2026. During this period, the value of transactions also increased more than three times from Rs 7,966 crore to Rs 25,613 crore.
This growth marks a major turnaround for one of India’s earliest UPI apps, which had rapidly lost ground after PhonePe and Google Pay emerged as the country’s dominant payments platforms. Despite this increase, BHIM’s share is still low. It handled about 1 percent of total UPI transactions in June, while PhonePe and Google Pay combined had about 79 percent of the market.
corporate reset
BHIM’s comeback started when NPCI made the app a separate subsidiary in 2024 and gave it an independent right to work and a profit-making business structure. After restructuring, NPCI invested Rs 300 crore in NPCI BHIM Services Limited. After this, BHIM increased cashback incentives to attract users and made major changes in its interface and payment process.
The app has also focused on branding itself as “India’s own payments app” to differentiate itself from PhonePe and Google Pay, which are owned by US companies. However, its recent growth has come after several years of declining market share. BHIM’s share in UPI transactions was around 40 percent in the first half of 2017, but by October of the same year it dropped to 25 percent. It further declined to about 6 percent by mid-2018 and to 4 percent by the end of 2018.
From payments to financial services
The next phase of BHIM will be to build a large financial-services business around its growing payments base. The company said in the Money Control report that the subsidiary plans to enter digital gold, credit and credit-card products as it grows. It is also working with banks to integrate its plug-in into their UPI apps.
Canara Bank has recently become one of the first lenders to activate this feature. Lalita Nataraj, Managing Director and CEO of BHIM, said in the MC report that we are expanding our work in large and underserved areas of payments, such as government payments, DBT and self-help groups, where the use of digital payments is still low.
This expansion is important because BHIM’s growth has not yet turned into a profitable business. While its parent company NPCI works as a non-profit organization, its subsidiary BHIM has a commercial purpose. NPCI BHIM Services recorded revenue of Rs 4 crore and loss of Rs 68 crore in FY 2025. Its financial results for fiscal year 2026 have not been made public yet.
WhatsApp Pay is growing rapidly
BHIM is not the only small UPI app that is growing rapidly. WhatsApp Pay processed 150 million transactions in June 2026, which is four times more than the 37 million transactions recorded in June 2024. During this period, its volume market share increased from 0.27 percent to about 0.7 percent. Due to this growth, WhatsApp overtook CRED and became the eighth largest UPI app in terms of transaction volume in June.
Other competitors are expanding even faster. Sachin Bansal-backed Navi has strengthened its position as the fourth largest UPI app, while Flipkart Group’s super.money has also made rapid progress. The ten-fold growth in BHIM indicates that the app has gained new momentum after years of decline. Its biggest challenge will be to convert this momentum into a habit, achieve sustainable revenue and give tough competition to the established market leaders of UPI.
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