HDFC, Fino Payments Bank lead MeitY's scorecard for digital transaction in July

Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) has ranked HDFC Bank and Fino Payments Bank on the top two spots in its scorecard for digital transactions completed in the month of July. 

MeitY has been framing policies to grow the number of digital transactions in the Indian economy as part of the government’s push to achieve 40 billion digital transactions by March 2020. The department monitors the cashless transactions and tracks the total number of digital payments (including UPI) completed every month. 

As part of the monitoring process, MeitY also releases a monthly scorecard for financial institutions who are processing digital payments in the country. 

The department awards them a remark after considering factors such as the percentage of target digital transactions achieved, percentage of successful transactions on the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), the number of merchants that have been onboarded for digital payments. 

The department allots targets for the number of digital transactions to financial institutions and banks with the largest volume of transactions allotted to players such as State Bank of India, ICICI Bank, Paytm and HDFC Bank among others.

Measuring on the above metrics, MeitY has issued scorecards for the month of July and rated 7 of the top performers in the “ Good” category. These include HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, IDBI Bank, Canara Bank, Paytm Payments Bank, Fino Payments Bank and HSBC Bank as per an ET report. 

Leading the pack, HDFC Scored 71 points while achieving 110% of its target set for July, followed by Fino which had a score of 70, and achieved 196% of its target. With a score of 69, Paytm stood at the third spot and facilitated the most transaction by any payments bank. 

While that's a vast improvement from its placement of 26th in the last month, it lagged in onboarding merchants in northeastern states managing only 1,257 merchants out of the target of 520,000.

The improved performance of digital payment facilitators has also given a push to the total number of transactions on UPI, which after four-month of stagnancy, has set new records in terms of volume as well as value.

In August, UPI for the first time crossed 900 million transaction volume mark. The NPCI-owned digital payments railroad has reached another milestone as it recorded 955.02 million volume worth Rs 1,61,456.56 crore in September.

Source: ET