UPI transactions witness significant upsurge, card payments shrink: Report

Three years old digital payments product UPI (Unified Payments Interface) continues to witness tremendous growth in India. After seeing 3X growth in transactions in 2019, UPI has overtaken credit cards as a preferred mode of payment.

In peer-to-merchant online transactions, about 38% of consumers preferred making online payments via UPI which is a 20% rise from the previous year's figure, according to Razorpay’s fourth edition of ‘The Era of Rising Fintech’ report.

Whereas 46% of consumers did transact through cards, it is a significant reduction of 10% in comparison to 2018.

Across all payments, UPI saw the highest growth of 885% in the past 24 months, added the report.

All the findings in the report are based on transactions held on Razorpay platform from January 2018 to December 2019.

“For the first time in the history of digital payments, we saw UPI overtaking cards. UPI has become the preferred choice not only for P2P (peer-to-peer) payments but also for P2M (peer-to-merchants) payments,” said Harshil Mathur, CEO and Co-founder of Razorpay.

Meanwhile, the share of net banking went down by 12% to 11.4% in 2019.

Among UPI apps, Google Pay continued its lead in digital transactions with a 59% share while PhonePe and Paytm contributed 26% and 7% respectively.

Owing to the growth of UPI, the share of wallets continued to decline despite the increase in the number of transactions.

Amazon Pay emerged as the most prefered wallet among consumers at 33%, followed by Ola Money at 17%.

According to the report, Food and Beverage (26%), Financial Services (12.5%) and Transportation (8 %) were the top three sectors to witness a rise in digital adoption.

In terms of the top cities, Bengaluru continues to be the most digitised city (23.31%), whereas Delhi saw major improvement grabbing the second spot (10.44%) followed by Hyderabad (7.61%).

The report further suggested that the fintech industry needs regulatory support to flourish. The regulation will help expand the digital payments infrastructure in India and startups need to invest more in local compliance rather than global launch, the report said.

Commenting on potential game-changer in 2020, Mathur said, “Trust will be bigger than convenience in digital payments”.

Razorpay claims to power digital payments for more than 6 lakh businesses including IRCTC, Airtel, BookMyShow, Zomato, Swiggy, Yatra and Zerodha, among others and plans to increase this to 1,000,000 by 2020.

The company, which is a late entrant in payment gateway business, has in FY19 emerged as one of the fastest-growing firms registering noticeable growth and improved its financials.

Razorpay curbed its losses to Rs 3.26 crore in FY19 from Rs 12.8 crore in the previous year, whereas the company’s earnings from the commission on the payment gateway service climbed up to Rs 193.03 crore in FY19 from about Rs 90 crore in FY18.