UPI merchant payments witness 15% rise in June

As more digital payment firms are working to provide an easy way to accept merchant payment, it seems to have been contributing to the rise in the share of merchant payments on Unified Payments Interface (UPI).

As per the latest report, merchant payments on UPI has grown 15% from April to 31% in June. Close to 240 million merchant payments were reported last month, said an ET report.

For payment firms, the rise of merchant transactions is a significant development as a number of instances for merchant payments is higher than p2p transactions.

As per Industry observers, this is at the initial stage and merchant payment has huge potential to get it developed into a large scale.

Of late, a couple of players in the space moved to merchant payments through offline acceptance point.

Last month, Paytm announced to invest money in offline merchant expansion, for which it claims to have high-frequency usage. It said to partner over 20 million kirana stores enabling them to accept the digital mode of payments including UPI, wallets and cards.

Whereas Flipkart-owned PhonePe, has also claimed to made headways towards offline merchant payments. It claims to have 5 million offline merchants.

Google Pay also partnered with Paypal to help a merchant accept payments online.

According to the last month report, Google-owned payments app had recorded 240 million UPI transactions amounting to Rs 55,000 crore in May whereas PhonePe and Paytm registered 230 million and 200 million transactions worth Rs 44,000 crore and Rs 38,200 crore respectively. Whereas in merchants payments, it contributes between 10- 20% of the overall numbers.

In May, Paytm claimed to clocked over 70 million of the estimated 120 million UPI-based merchant transactions. With about a 10% MoM growth in this segment, it has claimed to have 60% of UPI-based merchant payments market share.