The Employees Provident Fund (EPF) is expected to retain the interest rate for its six crore account holders at 8.5% in 2010-11, with a formal announcement likely to be made in August. "I hope that the recommendation of 8.5% by the finance and investment committee of the EPFO will be retained," Central Provident Fund Commissioner S Chatterjee said. "The EPF rate will hopefully be finalised in the next EPF Board meeting, which is expected in August," he said. Asked if there was any shortfall in return from the current payout of 8.5%, Chatterjee said there was no deficit.
What is BHIM? BHIM stands for Bharat Interface for Money , which is an easy way of transferring money from one bank account to an other via a smartphone using the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) platform . It is an instant payments application meant for sending money as well as requesting for payments. How is it different from UPI? BHIM is no different than UPI. But in the case of BHIM, customers don't have to download mobile applications of multiple banks, instead a single BHIM app downloaded from Android Play Store is sufficient. Other than that, payments can be made through a virtual payments ID or through account number and IFS code, same as UPI. What you need to use BHIM? BHIM can be used across an droid smartphones with version 4.0 and above, also it will be made available on iPhones and Windows smartphones very soon. Further, for feature phone users they need to use the USSD feature by dial ing *99#. Why was the need for BHIM felt when UPI is already in place? With various...