Digital Payments Game Gets Tougher: Paytm Leads UPI Transactions Race In January By 1 Mn

Competition in the digital payments industry remains a close affair for the top three players Alibaba-backed Paytm, Flipkart-owned PhonePe and Google-owned GPay. And the recent reports have shown that the competition has got tougher, closer and harder as these three top players inched their market shares closer to each other in January.

It is being reported that Paytm recorded 221 Mn transactions while PhonePe and Google Pay clocked nearly 220 Mn transactions each in January. Interestingly this leaves barely 11 Mn transactions for other players such as Amazon Pay, Freecharge, Mobikwik etc.

PhonePe, however, reportedly said that across all payment modes, it had 225 Mn transactions worth $4.2 Bn (INR 30,000 Cr) in January. However, the report emphasised that even as the number of transactions has jumped, peer to peer (P2P) transactions still dominate. It is being speculated that nearly 100 Mn to 120 Mn merchant transactions take place per month.

Further, the average ticket size of a UPI transaction is about INR 1,600 and the number could be hovering around INR 1,907 for Paytm, INR 1,300 for PhonePe and around INR 1,200 for Google Pay.

UPI is a government-backed instant payments platform developed by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI). One of the major growth-enabler of ease of digital payments in the country, the service clocked in 672.75 Mn transactions in January 2019 worth $15 Bn (INR 1.09 Lakh Cr), a 8.47% growth compared to December, 2018.

The NPCI launched Version 2.0 of UPI in July 2018, which included additional features such as generating collect payment requests along with invoice/ bill attachment, a one-time mandate with block functionality, signed intent/quick response code and others.

Inc42 had earlier reported that government’s BHIM facilitated 13.98 Mn transactions worth $870 Mn (INR 6,202.51 Cr) in January 2019. This is a 18% fall in transactions and its worth from 17.06 Mn transactions worth $1Bn (INR 7,589.19 Cr) in December 2018.

According to the July 2016 Google-BCG report, the digital expenditure is expected to grow to $100 Bn, that is, nearly 2.5 times more by 2020. The digital payments growth in the country has been largely attributed to the availability of UPI 24*7 along with the ease of access, being adopted by various digital payments players

[The development was reported by ET.]