UPI Transactions Reach 955 Mn Despite Slowdown In September

The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) on Tuesday announced the performance of its Unified Payments Interface (UPI) for the month of September. The data shows that UPI transactions in September were 955.02 Mn, a mere 4% growth in comparison to 918.35 Mn transactions in August.

In terms of the value of transactions, UPI recorded INR 1,61,456.56 Cr in September, a 4.5% growth against INR 1,54,504.89 Cr worth transactions in August.

Other key performance factors were:

• Aadhar-enabled Point of Sale (AePS) recorded 201.34 Mn transactions worth INR 8935.01 Cr, an 8% fall in the number of transactions
• National Electronic Toll Collection (NETC) clocked in 29.01 Mn transactions worth INR 658.94 Cr, a 4.4% growth in the volume of transactions

UPI has become a revolutionary process in the Indian digital payments industry and has seen wide adoption across the country. Recently, a BCG presentation said that between 2021-22 and 2024-25, the role of cash in the payments space will be meagre. The report said that UPI will dominate the payments space with 59% payments transactions.

This would be followed by mobile and internet-based payments, which will constitute a fifth of the total number of cash and non-cash transactions.

It further said that in 2018-19, the share of ATM transactions was the highest, followed by UPI-based digital payments with a 17% share, point of sale (PoS) machines (20%), and mobile and internet (13%), and cash comprising 5% of the total transactions.

UPI has been widely adopted by Paytm, PhonePe, Google Pay, BharatPe, etc and now NPCI is looking to improve UPI use through ecommerce platforms. In order to further ensure the wide adaptation of UPI, the NPCI also 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.

According to NITI Aayog’s “Digital Payments (2018 edition)”, India’s digital payments industry is estimated to grow to $1 Tn by 2023. It also suggested that the value of digital payments will likely jump from the current 10% to over 25% by 2023.