BHIM App, Caveat Usor ?

Is the newest kid on the payment app block, BHIM, strong enough to secure your money?

- Venkata Ravi Ram

The grandiose launch and promises behind the BHIM app — Bharat Interface for Money (BHIM) is an app that lets you make easy and quick payments using Unified Payments Interface (UPI) —are quite unmindful of the bugs that seem to be taking users for a thorough ride.

This trial-and-error approach with people’s money, largely those at the lower stratum of the society, when the country is not fully equipped to move to digital transactions, is exposing the loopholes.

While it may be viewed as a big opportunity for securing the softwares of the banks with greater firewalls, how to plug leakages that are finally turning out to be burdensome for retail customers who are no way concerned with such transactions is the billion-dollar question staring at India now.

If a citizen loses money that did not even exist in her account, and if she is made liable for the “loss to the bank,” whose door should she knock? Even if someone wishes to investigate, the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) is not maintaining traceability, by its own admission. Now, what and how can anyone probe, when there are no records available?

The bigger question is what could have been the loss accrued to individual customers that went unreported, yet.

What is NPCI?