UPI recorded close to 800 Mn transaction in March

NPCI-owned payments railroad UPI has achieved a new milestone in March. The unified payments interface recorded almost 800 million (799.54 Mn) transaction amounting to Rs 1,33,460.72 crore in last month. It was an 18 per cent hike in transaction volume and over 25 per cent rise in transaction value.

In February (28 days), UPI registered 674.19 million transactions worth Rs 1,06,737.12 crore. In terms of transaction value, it was one of the highest leaps for UPI where it crossed Rs 1.3 trillion figure.

Cashless transactions have now become simpler and convenient thanks to BHIM UPI. @dilipasbe #DigitalIndia #InstantPayments #HighOnUPI #NPCI pic.twitter.com/LNERMecgyS

— BHIM (@NPCI_BHIM) April 1, 2019

Meanwhile, NPCI-regulated inter-bank electronic funds transfer system (IMPS) has once again become the hottest option chosen for fund transfer. The instant payment feature recorded 190.18 million transactions worth Rs 1,76,288.88 crore.

In February, IMPS registered  166.37 million transactions amounting to 1,49,342.60 crore.

The growth in UPI transactions has come on the back of faster adoption in UPI-based payments apps such as government promoted BHIM and private players like Paytm, Google Pay, Phonepe and others.

While BHIM continued to struggle for the past 3-4 months, Google Pay and PhonePe have grabbed the opportunity to compete against the market leader - Paytm.

For instance, Paytm reportedly clocked 221 million transaction volume in January followed by PhonePe and Google Pay that recorded about 220 million UPI transaction each.

Recently, Google Pay has also revealed that it achieved 45 million monthly active users landmark and hit $81 billion annualised transaction run rate in March.

Apart from the aforementioned entities, there are 139 banks live on UPI platform.

In a surprise move, UPI is considering to levy a charge after 30 P2P transactions from May 1, 2019, onwards. Kotak Mahindra will become the first bank to charge Rs 2.50 for every transaction worth Rs 1,000 or less while the same would be Rs 5 for transactions of more than Rs 1,000.

This will be applicable across all platforms, including Paytm, PhonePe and Google Pay.

On average, a user does 5-10 UPI transactions in a month. 30 transaction cap is enough and the charge is not going to affect the users, say experts.

Over the past year, domestic and global players have been throwing their hat in the fray to taste the success of UPI in India. Of late, Xiaomi and Amazon have launched their UPI-powered payment feature in India, on the other hand, Reliance Jio and Tencent-owned WeChat are also in the pipeline to launch it soon.