PhonePe Continues To Dominate UPI With 44% Share, Google Pay Trails By 9%

PhonePe and Google Pay continue to dominate India’s Unified Payments Interface market as they collectively hold about 79% of the total UPI transactional volumes as of March 2021, National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) data show. Their combined transaction volume reached 2.16 Bn at a total valuation of INR 4.3 Lakh Cr as of March 2021.

Walmart-owned PhonePe continued to lead the pack in terms of the number of UPI transactions for March. The company accounted for 43.9% of the total UPI transactions volume and recorded a 23% jump in the number of UPI transactions compared to February. Meanwhile, Google Pay, which sits comfortably at the second spot had a 35% market share as of March 2021. The company recorded a jump of 15.6% in terms of the number of transactions.

PhonePe recorded 1,199.5 Mn transactions valuing about INR 2.3 Lakh Cr, meanwhile its rival Google Pay recorded 957 Mn transactions valuing about INR 2 Lakh Cr for the same period.  

UPI transactions recovered in March as it witnessed a surge in the number of UPI transactions, which witnessed a dip in February. According to NPCI data, a total of 2.73 Bn UPI transactions were recorded in March, a 19% hike in overall transaction volumes compared to 2.29 Bn UPI transactions in February this year. The overall transaction value also reached about 5 Lakh Cr in March 2021.

Gurugram-based Mobikwik which recently found itself in major trouble over a massive data breach saw a 15.6% rise in transaction volume in March 2021 compared to February. Mobikwik’s transaction volume stood at 2.2 Mn or INR 315.6 Cr in terms of valuation for the same period. The company as of March owns 0.08% of the market.

Vijay Shekhar Sharma’s Paytm app witnessed a 17.7% rise in UPI transactions for the period with 401.2 Mn transactions valuing about INR 43.2 thousand Cr. Meanwhile, Amazon’s Amazon Pay still has much ground to cover as it recorded 52.38 Mn transactions for the same period.

The youngest player in the UPI market, Facebook-backed WhatsApp Payments showed abysmal growth with merely 580K transactions in March from 550k it recorded the previous month. WhatsApp Payments were launched in November 2020. The transaction value through WhatsApp Payments stood at INR 38.17 Cr.

UPI is currently leading the already-growing digital payments segment in India. According to the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) data, the digital payments ecosystem has increased at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 55.1% over the past five years between 2016-2020. During the same period, the transactional value grew with an annual compounded rate (CAGR) of 15.2%.

Earlier this year, the finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman, during her Union Budget speech for 2021, allocated INR 1,500 Cr to the sector In a bid to further boost the digital payments ecosystem in the country. Besides UPI, transactions through Immediate Payment Service (IMPS) also increased in the previous month. IMPS recorded a 14% increase as its transaction volume increased from 318.79 Mn in February to 363.14 Mn in March.