NPCI Bharat BillPay Ltd. plans to create a unified digital layer to streamline invoicing, payments, reconciliation, and financing, aiming to transform MSME credit access and boost productivity in India’s growing business ecosystem.
NPCI Bharat BillPay Ltd. has outlined plans for a centralised digital layer that would tie together invoices, payments, reconciliation and financing for small businesses, in a move aimed at easing one of the biggest pain points in India’s micro, small and medium enterprise sector: turning sales into cash.
The proposal, first reported by KNN India, is designed to digitise the order-to-cash process through standard application programming interfaces and to automate reconciliation across more than 20 crore GST e-invoices generated each month. The goal is to make buyer-confirmed invoices easier for lenders to treat as financeable records, allowing credit decisions to lean more heavily on transaction history and cash flows than on collateral alone.
The timing reflects a wider financing shortfall. A report by NBBL and Bain & Company says formal credit of about Rs 34 lakh crore currently covers only part of an estimated Rs 92 lakh crore in MSME debt demand, leaving a gap of roughly Rs 60 lakh crore. The shortage is most severe among smaller firms, where formal channels meet only 30% to 40% of demand, according to the report cited by The Times of India.
Delayed payments are adding to the pressure. The same reporting says around Rs 8.1 lakh crore of MSME receivables are tied up in late collections, while finance teams spend about 30% to 40% of their time on reconciliation, invoice processing, payment follow-up and exception handling. NBBL argues that much of the challenge now lies not in the absence of digital tools, but in the lack of connectivity between them.
Saurabh Trehan, a partner at Bain & Company, said the next phase of business-to-business digitisation would depend on stronger links between business systems, payment providers, banks, financiers and public platforms. Noopur Chaturvedi, managing director and chief executive of NBBL, said interoperability would be central to the future of B2B commerce as more businesses move their operations online. The report also points to wider uses for the proposed infrastructure, including cash-flow intelligence, dynamic risk scoring, automated underwriting and market intelligence.
Beyond MSME lending, the report says India’s formal business sector is worth more than Rs 130 lakh crore and contributes about 45% of gross value added. It argues that a more connected digital ecosystem could lift productivity across that base, making the proposal potentially significant well beyond the credit problem that prompted it.
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