The national payments corporation of India (NPCI) on Monday said it will soon forge a tie-up with mobile wallet provider in Airtel Money, launched by the country's largest telecom operator.

Through the tie-up, which is expected to be sealed within two months, Airtel Money users can get integrated with the mainframe banking system, NPCI managing director and chief executive AP Hota said in Mumbai.

Till now, the non-banking mobile wallet companies have not come on the interbank mobile payment services (IMPS) platform even though the sector regulator RBI has given its nod.

"Airtel Money customers can only transact between themselves but are not able to send or receive money from a bank account, which will be possible once the tie-up is done," Hota said.

He said NPCI is already working with Airtel to make the necessary arrangements at the back-end systems and a formal launch will take a maximum of up to two months.

The IMPS already has 50 banks as members and also launched its merchant payment service today.

With the person-to-person money transfer service being the sole service till now, the IMPS witnessed 2.20 lakh transactions in August, Hota said.

The platform, which has the active support of various banks as well as the regulator, is targeting to take the monthly transactions to 10 lakh by March, Hota said.

Member banks have generated 39 million MMIDs or mobile user identifications among their account-holders and the number of transactions will grow rapidly once users get educated, Hota said.

For the merchants payment vertical, the IMPS has already tied up with a slew of merchants like IRCTC, LIC etc and will be adding more now on as the public launch is through, Hota said.

He also announced that the IMPS last week got life insurance giant LIC on board and added that the state-run insurer is looking at the platform to collect micro-insurance premiums.