UPI Payments: PhonePe, Google Pay Account For 81% Of Transactions In February

Continuing their dominance in the Indian digital payments space, Walmart-backed PhonePe and Google Pay again led the charts in February 2023. Together, the two players accounted for over 81% of UPI transactions in the month and 84.52% of transaction value. 

PhonePe retained its top position, processing the biggest number of UPI transactions in the month. It processed 46.71% or 351.9 Cr UPI transactions in February 2023, amounting to INR 6.2 Lakh Cr during the period under review. In terms of percentage, it accounted for 50.18% of the value of UPI transactions.

Google Pay processed 263.9 Cr transactions worth INR 4.24 Lakh Cr in February. In terms of percentage, it processed 35% and 34.34% of the total transaction count and value, respectively. 

Paytm took the third spot on the list, processing 113.7 Cr transactions (15.1% of the total) worth INR 1.36 Lakh Cr in February. The fintech player accounted for 11% of the total transaction value. 

Kunal Shah’s CRED accounted for just 3.65 Cr transactions in February 2022, but they were worth INR 17,902.2 Cr. On similar lines, Amazon Pay processed 4.78 Cr transactions worth INR 4,981.82 Cr during the month. 

Government-owned BHIM processed 2.32 Cr transactions worth INR 7,158.37 Cr. 

While peer-to-peer (P2P) transactions accounted for 77.42% of the total value, peer-to-merchant (P2M) transactions contributed the rest. Most of the P2P transactions were of more than INR 2,000, while just 3.15% of P2P transactions were sub-INR 500.

In terms of volume, P2M transactions accounted for 55% of the total count while P2P contributed the remaining 45%.

The data also shed light on category-wise transactions. While groceries, supermarkets, restaurants and digital goods were high transacting categories, wallet top ups, utilities and bars were tagged under medium transacting categories.

Overall, digital payments saw a decline after two consecutives months of growth. UPI transaction count fell 6.23% month-on-month (MoM) to 753 Cr in February 2023, while the cumulative value of transactions declined 4.77% MoM to INR 12.36 Lakh Cr. 

Last month, India and Singapore completed the cross-border linkage between homegrown UPI and PayNow. With this, Indian and Singaporean users can make cross-border payments via their respective apps. 

In February, Prime Minister Narendra Modi also lauded the UPI and said that the payments module can serve as a template for other countries to emulate.

Recently, banking major HDFC also began a pilot to enable digital payments in the offline mode under the Reserve Bank of India’s sandbox initiative.