While the three leading pillars of the UPI system – PhonePe, Google Pay and Paytm – have maintained their dominance, government-regulated BHIM has been on a rough ride in the past 12 months.
BHIM has contributed a mere 1.29% in the overall transactions via UPI in November amounting to Rs 5,853.50 crore. This is a new low for BHIM in the past 12 months.
During October, the UPI-enabled digital payments app had processed 16.96 million transactions worth Rs 6,339.61 crore.
PhonePe, Google Pay and Paytm haven’t revealed their volume breakdown via UPI for November yet. However, the trio was contributing close to 90% in overall transactions via the NPCI-owned payments railroad until August.
The downfall in BHIM’s transaction volume, as well as value, comes at a time when UPI is setting new records and had crossed the 1 billion transaction volume mark recently.
Even the transformation of BHIM, which included offering discounts for third-party apps, increased transaction limit and tapping vernacular audience in tier II and tier III market, didn’t work.
BHIM has partnered with several companies across segments such as e-commerce, travel, gifting, retail, dining and online pharmacy. With rewards and incentives, BHIM will join the likes of PhonePe, Google Pay and Paytm who have been profusely burning money to lure customers.
Entrackr has sent queries to BHIM regarding their strategy on customer acquisition. The story will be updated when they respond.
Apart from peer-to-peer payments, all these firms are tapping UPI-focused merchant payments for a long time. Where Paytm and PhonePe lead the merchant side payments ecosystem, new entrant BharatPe has emerged as the third distant player in this space.
BHIM has also been lagging behind these apps in terms of roping in merchants to use the platform for daily transactions.
According to a recent report by fintech and digital consulting firm The Digital Fifth, UPI will continue to scale with more innovative use cases. However, the attenuation in wallet business and UPI getting controlled by a few firms may discourage other companies from entering the space.
