Technical Glitches On UPI Have Fallen Below 1%

The decline rate for UPI transactions due to technical issues has now reduced to 0.8% from around 10% in 2016 when the digital payments infrastructure was introduced, according to Dilip Asbe, managing director and chief executive officer of National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI).

“The technical decline rates have reduced to 0.7-0.8% from as high as 8-10% in 2016,” Asbe said at 11th SBI Banking & Economics Conclave 2024 on November 19, PTI reported.

Further, India’s payments ecosystem is considering migrating low-ticket transactions to UPI Lite, Asbe said.

His comments come more than a month after the Reserve Bank of India increased the cap on transactions processed on UPI 123Pay to INR 10,000 from INR 5,000 earlier. Similarly, the per transaction limit for UPI Lite has also been raised to INR 1,000 from INR 500 earlier.

Introduced in 2022, UPI123Pay is designed for feature phone users. It allows them to access UPI services without an internet connection in 12 languages. 

These changes are expected to spur adoption of digital payments in the country, drive transactions on UPI and decrease cash usage.

It is pertinent to mention that the number of UPI transactions surged 10% month-on-month in October, reaching 16.58 Bn, up from 15.04 Bn in the previous month.

According to NPCI data, total UPI transactions processed in October amounted to INR 23.50 Lakh Cr, up almost 14% to INR 20.64 Lakh Cr in the previous month.

Meanwhile, NPCI International is exploring partnership with 10 countries to further push India’s UPI and RuPay stack, Moneycontrol cited Asbe as saying.

India has already partnered with 5 countries — including the UAE, Mauritius for the Rupay stack and Namibia, Trinidad and Tobago, and Peru for the UPI stack.

The Centre has taken several initiatives over the past few months to promote UPI on a global scale. In July, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced plans to integrate UPI with Malaysia’s national payments network, PayNet. 

Moreover, countries such as Sri Lanka, Mauritius, Bhutan, Nepal, the UAE, and Canada have already adopted India’s UPI payment model in some form.

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