Cashfree Payments, India’s leading AI-native payments company, today announced that it has received dual certification as both a Biller Operating Unit (BOU) and Customer Operating Unit (COU) on Bharat Connect, India’s unified bill payments infrastructure operated by NPCI Bharat BillPay Limited (NBBL). Combined with its RBI Payment Aggregator license, Cashfree is now among select non-bank entities in India capable of powering both sides of a Bharat Connect (BBPS) transaction within a single, regulated stack.
As a certified BOU, Cashfree can enable billers across lending, insurance, education, housing, and municipal services to collect recurring payments, EMIs, and bill payments across 700+ digital channels and over five lakh offline touchpoints including gram panchayats and rural institutions. As a newly certified COU, Cashfree can power the customer-facing side of transaction as well, enabling fintech apps, neobanks, lending platforms, and super-apps to offer bill payment to their users through a complete stack covering bill fetch and validation, complaints management, automated reconciliation, and real-time payments status.
Commenting on the announcement, Akash Sinha, CEO & Co-founder, Cashfree Payments, said, “Bharat Connect has been instrumental in making the promise of Digital India a reality for millions of Indian consumers and businesses, enabling them to seamlessly make and collect recurring payments. Our dual certification as both a BOU and COU on Bharat Connect is a direct reflection of our commitment to building payments infrastructure that is powerful and deeply embedded in India's financial ecosystem. Together, these certifications mean we can now serve every participant in a Bharat Connect Ecosystem from the biller collecting payments, to the customer-facing platform facilitating them under one roof, eliminating the complexity of managing multiple payment relationships. As Bharat Connect continues to expand from metros to grassroots institutions across India, we are committed to ensuring that billers and agent institutions alike can plug into the network simply, compliantly, and with the reliability that modern digital payments demand.”
Bharat Connect is India’s unified bill payment infrastructure, connecting over 22,000 billers across 25+ payment categories including utility bills, EMIs, recurring subscriptions, insurance, education fees, and municipal taxes. According to RBI’s recent Payments System Report, transaction value on BBPS has grown 16x in the last four years reaching Rs. 14.8 lakh crore as of 2025, making it one of India’s fastest-growing payment rails.
Commenting on the announcement, Noopur Chaturvedi, Managing Director and CEO, NPCI Bharat BillPay Limited, said, “Cashfree Payments receiving dual certification reflects the growing maturity of participants on the Bharat Connect ecosystem. As the network evolves, we are seeing a strong shift towards integrated models that can deliver both operational efficiency and a consistent experience to end users. This will enable greater participation from both billers and customers on Bharat Connect, strengthening trust and supporting the next phase of scalable growth across India’s bill payments landscape.”
The COU certification is critically timed and aligned with revised regulatory mandate requiring a COU to also act as the payment aggregator (PA) for its underlying Agent Institutions (AIs) for BBPS transactions. This eliminates the fragmented transaction and settlement flow which currently exist. Hence, all digital AIs shall process BBPS transactions by exclusively using the PA service of its COU (or COUs as the case maybe), thereby improving data integrity and simplifying reconciliation. Since most entities may not hold all three certifications (COU, BOU, and PA license), Cashfree's possession of all certifications within one organization provides a distinct structural advantage on Bharat Connect.
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