For The First Time, India Records Over 500 Mn UPI Transactions In A Month

The number of digital transactions that took place over government-backed Unified Payments Interface (UPI) in November was recorded at 524.94 Mn, according to data released by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI).

The volume of transactions in November rose 8.82% from October 2018.

This marks the first time that the volume of monthly UPI transactions has crossed the half a billion milestone. The total value of the transactions on the UPI platform stood at $11.78 Bn (INR 82,232.21 Cr).

In July 2018, NPCI had also launched UPI 2.0 which included an additional feature 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.

Recently, finance minister Arun Jaitley said that foreign companies such as Visa and Mastercard are losing market share to Indian financial services such as RuPay and UPI.

In August 2018, the total number of digital transactions had increased threefold to 2.44 Bn from 736.7 Mn transactions in October 2016, when the government’s demonetisation drive removed INR 1000 and INR 500 currency notes from the system.

The move, which led to a severe cash crunch, forced people and businesses to adopt digital payments and also sparked the government’s efforts to develop homegrown payments solutions such as UPI and RuPay.

Here are the statistics from the other digital payments platforms in India:

• Paytm recorded 137 Mn UPI transactions in September, a lion’s share of this coming from offline transactions
• The government-run BHIM registered a slight drop in transactions in September—to 16.3 Mn from 16.5 Mn in August
• Prepaid payment instruments or mobile wallets recorded 351.8 Mn transactions, up from 332.9 Mn in June and 350 Mn in May

According to Credit Suisse, India’s digital payments industry, which is currently worth around $200 Bn, is expected to grow five-fold to reach $1 Tn by 2023.