Paytm Claims 33% Market Share Of UPI Payments, Sets Aside $27 Mn For Further Promotion

Registering over 137 Mn Unified Payments Interface (UPI) transactions in the month of September 2018, One97 Communications, which owns digital payments brand Paytm, today (October 15) announced that it contributed over 33% of overall UPI transactions.

The company is enabling and promoting BHIM UPI for offline payments and more than 5 Mn offline merchants out of its 9.5 Mn merchant base now accept Paytm UPI. The company has also set aside $27.07 Mn (INR 200 Cr) to promote UPI transactions this year.

UPI, the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI)’s instant interbank payment system, recorded a total of 405.87 Mn transactions in September for a value of $8.18 Bn (INR 59,835 Cr). Of this total amount, the government-backed BHIM UPI registered 16.33 Mn transactions worth INR 7,064.86 Cr in September, compared to 16.5 Mn transactions (amounting to INR 6,872.57 Cr) in the previous month.

Key Drivers Of Growth For Paytm

Paytm claims to offer “the most comprehensive payment use cases as well as modes of payment” on its app. As of now:

• More than 20% of all payments on Paytm are made using BHIM UPI
• Mobile Recharge & payments, electricity and water bills and DTH recharges have witnessed the highest adoption rate
• Paytm BHIM UPI has been witnessing constant growth and has surpassed credit cards and net-banking for on-app and offline payments

Deepak Abbot, Senior Vice President, Paytm, said that India is embracing digital payments for its everyday use cases. Paytm has built an ecosystem where users can make payments for various services such as mobile recharges, electricity and water bills, metro commute, and also at offline stores.

“It is encouraging to see the widespread adoption of Paytm BHIM UPI as it is fast becoming a preferred payment method for millions of users making us the leader in UPI payments. We will continue to invest our efforts to introduce more consumers and merchants to the convenience of Paytm UPI for online and offline use cases,” he added.

Current Status Of PhonePe, Google Pay & WhatsApp Pay

Paytm’s arch-rival PhonePe is yet to disclose its UPI transactions volume for September. It must be noted that in July, PhonePe claimed itself to be the single largest player on the UPI network, ahead of payment apps such as Paytm and Tez (now Google Pay).

PhonePe also crossed the 100Mn transaction mark in July, driving nearly 70% of overall merchant transactions on the UPI network in that month.

Sameer Nigam, CEO and Co-Founder of PhonePe earlier said in a media statement that the company’s growth in market share is largely fuelled by two factors:

• PhonePe has added lakhs of new offline and online merchants on its platform in recent months and is seeing exponential growth in merchant transactions.
• Two, the NPCI recently started blocking any UPI transactions where the sender and receiver bank account number are the same. This move has effectively limited the ability of certain companies to incentivise shell transactions and artificially inflate their UPI numbers.

“As a result of these two factors, our market share of UPI transactions has jumped to 40% in July,” he added.

Further, in September, PhonePe also announced that it has registered a phenomenal 20X growth in payment transactions across offline stores. PhonePe also crossed the 2 Mn transaction mark last month at its offline organised outlets and is looking to set to scale up to 10 Mn by December.

WhatsApp is still struggling to get the final approval from the authorities (NPCI and RBI) for the full-fledged rollout of its digital payment service, WhatsApp Pay. The company has also built a system recently to store payments-related data locally in India.

Google Pay has not shared the transactions detail for September so far but claims to have a user base of 25 Mn in the country.

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