Google Pay is ahead of Paytm and PhonePe in UPI transaction value

Grabbing the lion's share of UPI transaction has become imperative and priority for Paytm, PhonePe, Google Pay, BHIM and other UPI-enabled payments apps.

While government-promoted BHIM has not been able to take off, private players have grabbed the opportunity with freebies, discounts, and other luring features to gather more UPI transactions on their platform.

Early adopters like PhonePe and Paytm have been maintaining their mojo until tech giant's Google UPI app - Google Pay silently started to eat up their market share with a new avatar (previously, it was known as Tez).

Up from 25 million monthly active users in September 2018 to 45 million monthly active users in March 2019, Google Pay is now neck to neck with Paytm and PhonePe's volume with around 225 million UPI transaction.

In February, media reports suggested that PhonePe and Google Pay were doing around 220 million transactions each while Paytm was leading the pack with 225 million transactions.

In March, UPI recorded around 800 million transactions worth Rs 1,33,460.72 crore.

Interestingly, Google Pay recorded UPI transactions worth Rs 43,000-Rs 45,000 crore in March. On the contrary, PhonePe and Paytm are said to have done transactions worth Rs 31,000-32,000 crore each.

An ET report also added that PhonePe is marginally ahead of Paytm in terms of the value of transactions.

This essentially means Google Pay is quite close to Paytm in terms of volume and way ahead of the Alibaba-backed company in terms of value.

Google in its official statement also said that it hit $81 billion (or Rs 5.7 lakh crore) annualised transaction run-rate in March.

In terms of average transaction value, Google Pay's ATV is higher by 50 per cent compared to PhonePe and Paytm. According to recent data revealed by BharatPe, Google's Pay ATV hovers around $4.6 while PhonePe and Paytm recorded their ATV as $2.6 and $2.4 respectively.

Till date, Google Pay is accepted at over 2,000 online merchants such as foodtech, travel, movie/event tickets, and even trading and investments. To gather more users, the tech giant is reportedly spending $12-15 million on a monthly basis.

Apart from P2P transfer and retail payments, Google Pay is also targeting its arch rivals through wealth management products like digital gold buying. It may enter into a full stack wealth management business and integrate other payments use cases to drive more transactions and build loyalty amongst customers.

Of late, Google has partnered with Pine Labs to boost its offline transaction where PhonePe is the market leader. The collaboration with Pine Labs will give access to over 3,30,000 point-of-sale terminals in over 3000 towns.