In a payment landscape where physical banknotes, cash on delivery or cheque payments are a thing of the past, ensuring that your customer-facing business supports a digital payment solution that is safe and seamless is an imperative.
In India, the diverse population, stradling multiple demographic and low resource scenarios has seen digital payments applications face some challenges. This includes factors like lack of trust, digital literacy, fiscal-savviness, connectivity and integration issues.
To combat the large spectrum of issues faced, National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) committed to enhancing and upgrading BHIM; India’s digital payment platform. The BHIM app heralded the adoption of UPI (Unified Payment Interface) and completely disrupted the entire payments landscape in India. It provides an inclusive, robust, intuitive, scalable and adaptive digital payment solution. Today UPI supports transactions of up to 12 lakh crore a month.
In this digital endeavor, NPCI partnered with Thoughtworks for exceptional engineering and agile delivery. Thoughtworks combined its expertise across product design, business analysis and technology to help NPCI reimagine and build India’s first largest payment application. We redesigned the user interface and rebuilt the BHIM app on an open platform using React Native.
Our approach helped eliminate friction in the user’s experience. We developed intuitive customer onboarding journeys, upgraded user interface and fixed transaction latency issues in the BHIM app. This, along with the enhanced backend processing of several million transactions, helped NPCI achieve and maintain greater user adoption.
We also helped NPCI achieve and maintain greater user adoption by developing intuitive customer onboarding journeys, providing an upgraded user interface and fixing transaction latency issues in the BHIM app. Today, the app sees more than 8 billion transactions a month and no less than 100,000 a day. BHIM is one of the top five apps to send and receive money in India. Our partnership with NPCI (and other global public sector clients) has been instrumental in ensuring Thoughtworks is the only IT services provider in the Digital Public Goods Alliance.
The app needed migration from a less scalable Mystique framework to a highly scalable React-Native framework, using a strangler approach, and is powered by an upgraded tech stack to support a highly scalable platform.
Unique to the collaboration was stringent timelines that meant NPCI and Thoughtworks had to ensure revamped BHIM was available for citizens in time for its third anniversary.
At NPCI, we are focused on bringing innovations to the digital payment ecosystems through the use of technology for achieving greater efficiency in operations and transforming the way payments are perceived. Thoughtworks has continued to be a key partner in BHIM’s revolutionary journey. BHIM’s digital journey has benefited from Thoughtworks’ deep technical and user experience capabilities, their pragmatic delivery and their architectural vision for building citizen-scale applications.
Results
Rebuilding India's Digital payment platform for
1.3B people
App supports
8bn+ monthly
100,000+ daily
transactions
For more on digital payments, specifically around navigating the complexity and understanding customer impact, read this edition of Thoughtworks Perspectives, a publication of business and industry insights for digital leaders.
