UPI records marginal but first ever fall in volume, value continues to surge

Since its inception, Unified Payment Interface(UPI)--an inter-bank transaction facility developed by National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) has witnessed the first ever fall in transaction volume (aka a total number of transactions).

The volume of the transaction recorded by UPI for May month (31 days) reached 189.48 million which was 190.08 million (a marginal decrease) for the preceding month(30 days).

Earlier, the UPI-based transaction volume witnessed 6.75 percent growth in April month in comparison to March when it registered a mere 4 per cent uptake.

Despite a slight fall in transaction volume, last month UPI witnessed a significant surge of 23 per cent in value of the transaction. As per NPCI data, the transaction value for May month was Rs 33,288.51 crore. In April, the transaction value grew by 11.78 per cent.

NPCI-owned another payment feature--Immediate Payment Service (IMPS) witnessed a rise in transaction value as well as volume in May in comparison to last month. The real-time inter-bank electronic funds transfer system grew by 6 per cent to 116 million in May.

The transaction volume for the same was recorded at 109 million in the previous month.
IMPS transaction value also grew by 6 per cent in May to reach Rs 108,574 crore.

Besides Paytm, government-owned BHIM, PhonePe and Google Tez, FreeCharge and Mobikwik have also joined the unified payments ecosystem in recent times.

Currently, there are more than 91 banks live on the RBI regulated platform which will indeed influence its transactions volume as well as value. Facebook-owned WhatsApp is another player to join the bandwagon soon.

Meanwhile, payments major Paytm has maintained its leadership and claimed 33 per cent of total UPI transaction for the month of April. The figure for May is yet to come.

Flipkart-owned Phonepe also showed a decent growth in UPI transaction in partnership with Yes Bank ( 22 per cent market share with 42.4 million transactions).

Contesting the UPI league, public sector banks such as SBI and PNB have also witnessing decent uptake in their UPI-based solutions. While PNB reported around 950,000 users on the NPCI-owned application, the largest public sector bank claims to have 1.84 million active peer-to-peer payments users.

Launched in April 2016, UPI has till now processed over Rs 1 lakh crore with 91 crore transactions. Moreover, NPCI is also planning to launch UPI 2.0 for merchants. It will ease the payments between individuals and businesses.