With 45 Mn MAUs, Google Pay hit $81 Bn annualised transaction run rate in March

Google's UPI-based payment app Google Pay has seen remarkable growth since its 18 months of launch in India. Escalating on the back of UPI growth, Google Pay has hit $81 billion (or Rs 5.7 lakh crore) annualised transaction run-rate in March.

Interestingly, UPI monthly transaction value hit Rs 1 lakh crore for the first time in December 2018 and it was hovering around the same figure for the month of January and February 2019.

This essentially means UPI annualised transaction run rate is around Rs 12-13 lakh crore and Google Pay is contributing a larger part of it (approximately 45 per cent). For instance, Google Pay recorded about 220 million UPI transaction in January, where the total transaction was registered at around 672 million.

This is an excellent growth for the company, that had a transaction run rate of $30 billion in August and 25 million active users in September 2018.

Now, it has a user base of 45 million and it is used across three lakh cities, towns, and villages in India. According to the company's press statement, two out of every three transactions happen from beyond the top seven metros.

So, the company's monthly user base has reached quite closer to competitor PhonePe and fall well behind the top player in this space - Paytm. However, the top two players haven't revealed their transaction volume data for the past two-three months.

Like Paytm, PhonePe and other UPI-based payments players, Google Pay is also testing products in wealth management space such as digital gold buying option on its platform.

Besides, Google Pay had recently announced a collaboration with Pine Labs to boost its offline transaction. With this collaboration, Google Pay can have access to over 3,30,000 point-of-sale terminals in over 3000 towns.

Till date, Google Pay is accepted at over 2,000 online merchants such as foodtech, travel, movie/event tickets, and even trading and investments.

Google Pay also received good response from people when it collected $2 Mn in 10 days for the Pulwama attack and $800,000 in 6 days for Kerala floods.