UPI Transactions See Marginal Dip To 17.89 Bn In April

The Unified Payments Interface (UPI) transactions saw a marginal decline of 2.2% to 17.89 Bn in April from 18.30 Bn in the previous month.

On a year-on-year (YoY) basis, the transactions count surged 34%. 

As per the National Payments Corporation of India’s (NPCI) data, the transaction count of 17.89 Bn accounted for a total amount of 23.95 Lakh Cr in April, a 3.3% decline as recorded against transactions worth INR 24.77 Lakh Cr in the previous month. 

In March, UPI transaction count jumped to 18.30 Bn from 16.11 Bn in February, recording a fresh all-time high.

April UPI transaction count is 11% higher than the transactions recorded in February.

Notably, the average transaction count surged marginally to 596 Mn in the month under review, from 590 Mn in March. On the contrary, the average daily transaction amount stood at 79,831 Cr in April, down from 79,910 Cr in the preceding month.

UPI’s April Throwback

The decrease in the UPI transaction volume can be attributed to frequent outages faced by the users in April.

Excluding the minor inconveniences, users reported major UPI failures twice this month. 

On April 2, more than 500 users flagged issues with UPI on outage tracker DownDetector. Back then, NPCI confirmed the outage and  attributed it to “increased latency” in the UPI network.

Next week, digital transactions were hampered again due to UPI failure. As per DownDetector, more than 2,387 users reported issues on the platform. NPCI confirmed the issue and said that it is “currently facing intermittent technical issues, leading to partial UPI transaction declines.”

Taking note of these frequent issues with UPI, the payments authority met with major banks and UPI apps to discuss recent outages in the system. During the meeting, NPCI urged banks and third-party app providers to be cautious when commenting publicly on the outages.

NPCI issued a notice on April 26, directing PSP banks and acquiring banks to limit their application programming interface (API) requests to UPI for appropriate use only.

API is a set of rules which allows different software systems to communicate with each other. Over utilisation of these APIs can lead to slower time response, delay in transactions for all the users of that PSP and failure of transactions due to queue overflow. 

What’s New For UPI ?

Besides the whole outage situation, UPI also saw several other developments last month. 

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) allowed NPCI to revise transaction limits for person-to-merchant (P2M) payments on the UPI, while person-to-person (P2P) transactions will continue to remain capped at INR 1 Lakh.

Besides, NPCI managing director Dilip Asbe said that the authority is planning to onboard 200-300 Mn new users to UPI.

The finance ministry also cleared the air by declining the rumours claiming that the government is mulling to levy goods and services tax (GST) on UPI transactions above INR 2,000.